Sean, why do you assume that this is always a fake technique?

Unless a given marketer is experienced with high volume launches, and has multiple servers set up in advance, it's quite possible to overwhelm the available connections to a server.

To spend time and effort setting up a launch, cultivating partners who will be sending traffic, etc., only to turn away people with money in their hands makes no sense.

As a marketer, if such a thing does happen (and I'll grant that it seems to happen a lot), I'd want to spin it in as positive a light as possible.

Instead of saying:

"Jeez, I didn't really think anyone would actually buy this thing, so I put it on a Baby account at HostGator and swamped the shared server I was on. I really screwed the pooch on this one..."

They say things like:

"Wow! So many people were fighting to get this package when it went live, my server melted down from the volume. Don't worry, we've added capacity and you might still have a chance to get this wildly popular whatchamajiggy before it sells out..."

Another thing, as I alluded to in another thread, just because some marketer sends an email that claims the volume melted the server down doesn't mean it did. If sales are slow, and you want to manufacture some social proof, you can send out a "too hot to handle" email to try to jump start things.

I'm guessing that most of the "server crashes" are more bandwidth/pipeline problems than actual server crashes, and that most of them are real...

Think about it - if you have a hot seller with people lined up to give me money, would you rather move as many people as possible through the line as quickly and smoothly as possible, or play games with fake server crashes? I know which one I'd pick...

Builds hype.

Adds a sense of urgency.

Builds anticipation.

Gives the owner, and JV's, an excuse to mail you again.

Most people who have done a launch before know the requirements needed. I'd bet the fair share of server crashes are planned.

Zach

Sometimes the server might crash. I remember John Reese once mentioned it. He had a power cut when he did his million dollar launch..

It depends...we cannot judge whether some "fake it".

They definitely do crash for several reasons.

While I won't speak for people that purposely crash their servers, ( if anyone would be
that dumb to lose money they could have otherwise made had they left the site up)
I will say that having been involved in many server crashing launches, it's the last thing any of us ever want to happen.

- Jason

One can't really be sure about whether it's done on purpose or not. In most of cases, I believe that it's not, however I'm sure there are times where it is actually done on purpose.

It adds a lot to the mystery and scarcity that might happen during a launch. Also, it creates a sense of not knowing what's going to happen next.

In my opinion, it's not really necessary to do a server crash. There are a ton of other stories that one can come up with and which will not interfere with people who actually want to buy the product involved.

Kevin

[DELETED]

News for you guys! Crashing a server LOSES business and looks unprofessional! It happens to EVERYONE! I don't know all the details but the way in which such things work is just not the greatest. In fact, to lessen the impact, they start SEVERAL instantiations of the server up and, eventually, they get paired down. MORE instantiations means you need MORE memory, faster CPUs, etc... And HECK, even TCP/IP is far from perfect. In fact, collisions are built into the spec. They aren't only not unusual, they are EXPECTED! And more connections means they become more likely.

SO, WHY do they do it? Why do computers run out of memory? THEY JUST DO!!!! EVEN Amazon has had this problem. If the company doesn't have a monopoly, that crash may get me to buy ELSEWHERE! If they DO have a monopoly, I may talk myself out of the purchase.

Steve

These really happen. Here's what goes on.

You're building your launch platform. You put up all your teasery stuff. You say "product is live on X date at X time." Everyone sets bookmarks. For about a month and a half, you get a certain amount of traffic.

The datacenter optimises your server for about that amount of traffic. They hook you up to all the right switches and routers to get that much traffic.

Launch day hits. And on the zero-hour, your site gets hammered with roughly 2,000 times that traffic all at once.

The datacenter isn't ready. The equipment is overloaded. A router in the building craps little green apples, takes a dump on a mass storage peripheral, and half the place goes tits up.

(It's truly amazing to hear all those alarms go off... one by one, at just under the speed of light, thousands of machines start beeping in a neat little expanding ripple from the problem component. The better operators can pinpoint the problem component by sound faster than you can find it in a network trace.)

Now the hosting company is running around like headless chickens trying to get servers back up for a couple hundred customers. Once they figure out which server had the "problem," THEY SHUT IT DOWN until they can figure out what to do.

Because while we always say "call PayPal and let them know your launch day so they don't shut off your account," nobody ever bothers to say "call your web host and let them know your launch day so you don't crash your server."

Sometimes it is legit. If the hype built around a product launch is good enough. However, nowadays I think the markerters that do that should take the time to make sure they have backup plans in case of an overload/traffic overload.

Most hosts will disable your site when you are using 25% of available resources
because you will be slowing all other customers.

However, the big marketers likely use dedicated or even colo or own-hosted servers
and grossly underestimate the traffic and even the size of their images matters at
that point. ( You'll want a text-based site - lean in images )

It is also a great excuse to email everyone a few more times

Sorry server crashed - we're offline for a while ( people will check it anyway )
Server is back up YAY!
Sorry again about the server crash ( here's bonuses )
Wow we got so much angry email about our server crashing
- we're giving away 10 more great bonuses
5 days later

We're so sorry about our server crash that we are relaunching
our product again on a bigger server so you can all buy it without problems
Remember - "how to build a crappy website on which to post photos of your pets"
goes live tomorrow!

Some people fake it, some people don't......really, who gives a crap? I have no way of actually knowing either way.

<Gets back to building own business>..............

RoD

I would put my money on capped bandwidth. Just because your host says you have hundreds of gigs or even unlimited bandwith doesn't mean you can use it all at once.

Here are a few potential issues:

1. They have cheap servers with limited bandwidth available for incoming traffic and small uplinks like 10mb or 100mb that cannot handle the traffic.

2. They pile a bunch of scripts or multiple auto loading videos on the page that all load at once. Ie. Failure to optimize a site.

3. They are using economy hosting and their host limits concurrent connections and mysql queries.

4. They have limited and non burstable bandwidth available to them.

5. They have bottlenecks in their scripts/software that they were not expecting and do not have the experience or programming staff or ability to fix the issue.

6. Or it was just plain bad luck and a hardware failure... ie. when it rains it pours.

In IM most server crashes are due to inexperience, poor planning, lack of technical knowledge and just being plain cheap when it comes to investing in the proper resources.

However, even google had problems keeping up with the traffic when Michael Jackson died.

They thought it was a ddos attack at first.

Even a dedicated server can buckle under extreme load, especially if there are a lot of videos on the site and/or the site is database driven (as in the case of membership based sites).

A popular technique being used to reduce the likelihood of a crash during a big launch, is in addition to hosting on a beefy and optimized dedicated server (with a large allocation of bandwidth memory and a large data pipe), host the site graphics and videos on another service designed to handle heavy loads such as Amazon S3.

And of course as has already been mentioned is to make sure the ISP hosting your server is aware of your upcoming launch with an idea (if possible of the expected level of traffic).

With the recent announcement of mysql on EC2 available at Amazon Web Services companies now have more options than ever for development and scalability:

Amazon Launches Hosted MySQL Database Cloud Service

If you don't know why they're doing it, how is it you know they are faking it?

Server load. No one did load testing.

Here we go again...

[sarcasm]

Yes, these people fake server crashes because they love to miss out on potential sales. It makes perfect business sense.

[/sarcasm]

:rolleyes:

Just ask yourself a simple question.
Would YOU fake a server crash or would you satisfy the hot demand for your product?
Hmmmmm......one of the easiest questions I have ever had to answer. LOL

Dave