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Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday
eweekhickins writes "A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. In fact, almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance."
Money
How do you know they didn't have huge servers - just not huge enough? (Ditto for bandwidth, etc...)
Seriously, predicting traffic is pretty much a black art. Even if you build out for what you thought would be enough, you still could get caught flatfooted.
And why don't the brick-and-mortars open up at midnight, with 3 times the normal cash registers open? Because the near riot is good for business when it gets covered in the local news. There's a reason that each store stocks 12 units of the best deal, and most of the other prices are just normal sale prices... that generates an aura of crazed shopping, and a line of 200 people who are willing to stand hours in the cold -- 188 of whom will be buying products at a profit.
This is an excellent point. Companies just keep sticking more fancy looking crap on their websites leaving bandwidth unchanged.
My university did this with the registration website. The added flash and java to make it look cool, except when registration time hit, all that load brought the registration server to its knees. When many students weren't able to register for several days after their allotted time, the system was reverted to the plain ol' html interface it was before. When will websites realize that just because your public has the bandwidth, doesn't mean they need to use it?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?