Anatomy of a launch. Or, welcome to the human race!

No matter how much you check, how many times you test and how certain you are that everything is working, Murphy and his good friend Sod still manage to make an unwelcome and unwanted appearance at just the wrong moment.

I launched a new product on Tuesday and smugly thought I had it all covered.

But within an hour I got a Skype message from a friend telling me that my site had crashed.

You hear about these big launches all the time and how their servers melt down at the drop of a hat - and, frankly it always sounds a bit suspicious. But the fact is that no matter how well you plan, you can never quite account for your own stupidity.

I had set the bandwidth level of my domain very low during my own testing period to prevent unwanted downloads before I could secure the URLs. And, you guessed it, forgot to increase the bandwidth allocation for the launch.

Easily and quickly sorted, but thank goodness my friend noticed in good time!

Then I got an email telling me that there were some typos in my sales page. Not the end of the world, but I don't know how many times I'd read it and missed them! Again, easily fixed, but it shouldn't have happened.

When sales started the emails really started coming in - the download link was going to a 'this page doesn't exist' screen. Somehow I'd messed up the name of the download directory and so the first few customers couldn't access the product.

I made that change after I'd tested the links and for no good reason. Idiot!

Once again the fix took seconds, but the egg on my face might take a bit longer to wipe off.

But everything was working fine now, wasn't it. Wasn't it?

Another friend emailed to tell me that the bonus video and the resources PDF files were not in the downloaded zip file. I knew they were because I'd seen them there myself. So what was the problem?

It turned out that the download zip file on the server was slightly different to the final 'all errors corrected' version, but because it was such a big file I had omitted to make sure that the very latest version was uploaded. Nothing was missing, but a couple of vital links were wrong.

Again, correcting the problem was a small thing, but very annoying to me, and more importantly, to my customers..

Now, at last, it seems that all is working like clockwork. I have my fingers crossed while I'm typing this of course (which in itself could lead to some nasty errors!)

Now keep in mind that I 'thought' I'd checked, double-checked and triple-checked everything. I 'thought' I'd eliminated all the bugs (and I had found quite a few) and I 'thought' I could smugly sit back and enjoy a smooth-running launch.

I'm sure all those big name guys who have server meltdowns think the same thing too. After all, while things are messed up, you don't make sales - and who knows if people will give you a second chance?

Stuff happens. It is annoying, frustrating, infuriating, humiliating and frankly, a bloody nuisance, but it happens and there doesn't seem to be all that much any one of us can do to avoid it.

We are all human, and I am beginning to think that applies to me as well!

Just do your best and sort things out as fast as possible.

Or, as my favorite WW2 poster says "Keep Calm and Carry On".

Martin (Bruised, battered, but holding up.)