During the holidays, stores are jam-packed with customers and businesses have to prepare by hiring extra holiday help. The same idea serves true for the online version of those stores which see a boost in traffic during this time of year. Major sites (including Best Buy and Amazon) suffered outages last year because they were unprepared for the onslaught of holiday traffic. Trying to prevent that problem from occurring again this year, big and small companies alike are looking at what they can do to boost their bandwidth and handle the flow of customers. This preparation is centered on finding ways to balance a customer’s desire for a quick response time with their interest in multi-media and interactive activity on the site. Sites want to provide dynamic feedback to the customer (think Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought”) without slowing down the system. This means looking at bandwidth, processing power, and software options.