How To Keep A Server Up During A Product Launch
Alex Poole over at his blog has made an excellent post about how to keep a server up during a product launch.
Some people think the “whoops my server went down during launch” is a trick to get people back to their site, but any marketer who’s had a server go down during a launch will know it’s a harrowing process, and not something you’d want to pretend had happened. If a server goes down during a top marketer’s product launch they could be losing tens of thousands of dollars in sales per hour!
So, hat tip to Alex. Hopefully we’ll see a few less emails along the lines of, “whoops, my server died”.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:51 am
Wow! I never thought this. I am actually one of those people who thought that marketers “made their servers crash” on purpose to get people visiting and anticipating going back to visit their sites.
After reading your short explanation above, I realize how flawed my thinking was. Isn’t funny how many things in this niche we think are always well planned, thought out “marketing hoaxes”? Hope this is how you spell “hoaxes”
March 26th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Great but strange that server’s are made to crash for marketing purpose too. People can think of anything, aren’t they? I always thought that it was a nightmare to happen during product launch. But then, it’s a great marketing tip too, I learnt it now.
Regards,
Ravi Verma
March 27th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Great article, Neil! Better to think about these things before they happen than to get in a panic on the day! Seems simple really, but the simple things often get overlooked.
I guess that we are all rather cynical when it comes to people “taking” money off us and would rather think that it is a ploy to increase the scarcity value.
March 27th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
So sorry Neil, for some reason the link on my name for my website was incorrect on the above comment.
Proof that mistakes do happen by accident and it can happen to anyone at any time!
March 27th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
I can see the idea for causing a server crash – Like having a long line outside of a club, but the online reality is lost revenue.
March 29th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Having previously provided tech support for UK shopping store ‘Next’ during the launch of their online sale, I can honestly say that although marketing might get a buzz from being able to say ‘we made the servers burn out’, the board of director’s are NEVER happy when tons of potential customers cannot access the site!
March 31st, 2009 at 2:19 am
Good post Neil, I’ve seen the “my server crashed” method used before, some really did, but most was used for that purpose, good resouse…
Terrance Charles
April 1st, 2009 at 1:59 am
I read the blog post and found it interesting.
But I’m still a skeptic.
This launch was a classic chapter and verse blueprint of Cialdini’s book ‘Influence. Mike Filsame is a student of Cialdini’s research.
Mike is also a great Marketer and probably made several million dollars on his launch.
If I had his level of experience and financial resources I would do everything in my power from having this happen.
On a side note, Oprah Winfrey about a year ago did a webinar series with Eckart Tolle. On the first night, there were over 800,000 on the net listening in and her servers crashed and this was a free webinar series.
After the first week, to my knowledge she had no other problems and had over 1,000,000 viewers.
Just my two cents.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:13 pm
I noticed so many marketers pulling this stunt of late. Even with free products. I don’t want to name the ones who did this, but personally I think it’s a lame way of getting attention.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Mike is also a great Marketer and probably made several million dollars on his launch.
If I had his level of experience and financial resources I would do everything in my power from having this happen.
April 1st, 2009 at 11:17 pm
I fail to see any benefit to staging a server crash for a product launch – sure, it may give the impression to the user that the site has experienced massive amounts of traffic, but so what? In the internet world, they will simply move on to the next big thing and will likely forget about you all together. So yeah, it’s pretty vital that your site is hosted on a stable server with plenty of bandwidth. Anything less would prove to be a massive #fail!
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:39 am
Well wonder what benefit the marketer gets by a getting a server down. If there is going to be no sale and only people visiting the site and moving off, he maybe at a loss.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:28 am
I think it’s better for a big marketer to get in touch with his host before every big launch to check on things, and let them know he’s got something big coming up so that they can suggest if there was something he could do to guarantee that the server stays up. And it’s the best technique if you’ve got a shared hosting account. That way if the host insist on moving to bigger account, you could always send them a few buck as a down payment and tell them if you exceed the B/W limit or anything, they should raise the limit or something, and then you’d decide whether or not you want to upgrade.
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 pm
I think you need to start by anticipating that you may generate enough traffic to cause server issues. Implement load balancing or have a “backup plan” if you need more bandwidth.
April 4th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I’m pretty sure stompernet uses the “our server crashed” marketing routine when they periodically open for new subscribers. Seems to work well for them.
Otherwise, yeah…I think you want your server up and running! Especially for hard goods that are impulse buys.
April 5th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Making sure that your server won’t play dead on you during your product launch is like going to the battle fully-armed. I could not stress enough how important this is for every online marketer.