My server melted on launch day - It really does happen!
I know a lot of people here get the same emails I do from some of the usual suspects after a launch with something along the lines of "the response was so good our server practically melted and we couldn't let everyone in before the deadline, so we've extended it to give you chance to sign up" yada yada yada.......
And most people probably think it's some sort of marketing ploy - and maybe it often is.
But...
It does actually happen.
I just launched a new membership on Sunday and the server is the one my programmer runs our high ticket software systems on. It's been in use for several years and has been solid as a rock - so launching a wordpress membership site should be simple - right?
Well, we sent the email out letting people know it was now open and thousands of them ran across to the server and almost 100 signed up in the first 24 hours.
The server crashed! (for the techies among you - the Apache server crashed and also stopped some other services) and needed rebooting. Then as the load stayed up with thousands of hits an hour we kept needing to restart some services.
There ended up being 2 issues causing the problems:
1 - The PHP service needed more memory than expected. Wordpress recommend 50MB and we allocated 100MB but it wasn't enough and we've doubled it now and that helped.
2 - Wordpress has 'issues' with particular php versions so we're going to need to upgrade the version on php on the server. The issue with that is that when you do this php installs some things you don't want and uninstalls some things you do, so it's not necessarily straight forward.
Now that we're back to normal running and the surge has passed things look ok, but I just wanted to give a reality check to people who think these things are all just marketing tactics - these launch day issues DO genuinely happen and so next time you get one of those emails, consider that it might actually be someone who really did get a bunch of problems they weren't expecting.
On the plus side for us - it was our server so we had full access to get in and make all the changes. If you're using a limited hosting account and you need to rely on someone else understanding these problems and responding for your launch - it could be much more painful.
The lessons.....
1 - Not everyone is creating fake problems to sell you stuff
2 - Get your own server or a very good relationship with a provider in your timezone and let them know about your launch
Andy
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