In an ideal world, you want your messaging campaigns to reach your customers as fast as you can. However, sending campaigns to a large number of recipients can easily become a problem for most companies. Although engagement is a good thing, reaching all your customers at once, can result in serious traffic surge. If your app or website (or any web services you might be using) is not ready for it, you can easily experience server overloads, slowdowns, outages and additional costs.
To help you cope with this, Notificare has developed several mechanisms that can either help you spread the load or notify you when it's time to scale your infrastructure.
Throttling
This is a feature of our platform, available on every plan, that defines at what pace our system delivers your campaigns. It is super simple, and just requires you to define a maximum number of messages we should send, per second, on a per-message basis:
This is a robust solution, and is a great way of delivering large amounts of messages without overwhelming your servers.
Burst control
This solution would involve allowing a burst of messages to be sent at a high rate for a short period of time, followed by a cooldown period. You would usually need to divide your target audience into smaller groups, and create a campaign where you would schedule a message to each group, at different times.
Although this technique requires some planning and preparation, it is a solid solution if you are looking to prevent large amounts of messages to be delivered at once.
Additionally, you could achieve the same results using other mechanisms that Notificare provides. We are talking about our powerful import jobs, where you provide us with a CSV file containing a batch of users to trigger a messaging campaign.
Webhooks & Scale up
Finally, if you are ready to scale your infrastructure based on demand, this solution might be your best option. Thanks to our Live API, you can receive signals from our platform whenever a large campaign is created.
This would allow you to prepare your servers for expected demand, and effectively handle the increase in requests that a large Push, Email or SMS campaign could generate. Although this is by far the best solution, it only makes sense for those organizations that are able to cope with additionally costs (Live API is an add-on feature) and complexity.
Ready to try it yourself?
Ultimately, the best technique for throttle message delivery will depend on the specific requirements and constraints of your infrastructure. A combination of all these techniques may also be used to achieve the desired results.
As always, if you have any questions, we are available via our Support Channel.