when it all goes horribly wrong
What happens when the web goes horribly wrong.
Well a classic example is a marketing campaign run by Virginblue Velocity Rewards.
I received my points statement and a well hyped campaign to play an online game and go into win up to $70k in prizes.
So of course what did i do. I went on to play it. I love the web and how easy it is to enter competitions!
So i did.
I clicked through to http://www.velocityglobal.com.au/ but alas what did i find…..
an error 509. Hmm surely not. I tried again.
Lets see what message you get for an error 509.
No surely not - Bandwidth Exceeded? Yes Virginblue’s Velocity Global has run out of bandwidth! Click on the image to read the whole message!
So needless to say I was a little disappointed.
Obviously the competition is getting to be fairly popular. But this does a highlight a bigger issue. As marketing departments get more involved in the use of Web technology, to drive results for their business, something i advocate whole heartedly, they have to remember, as do all of the stakeholders in business management, that just like off-line or other media campaigns, you need to understand and make contingencies for the success or not of your campaigns and what failing at it could mean to your brand.
Huge success on the web is almost an impossible problem to fully cater for, servers can easily be overloaded even with major scale solutions. But what would the PR spin be on such a problem. You could turn it to your advantage, as long as you have a plan and a nimble team who could turn the lemons into lemonade.
Of course this problem may not be due to success just the left arm and right arm not talking to each other. That happens more often than not in www and other IT problems.
What can we all learn from this?
Even so called bigger companies get it wrong, so it is what you learn from it that matters on how to do it better next time.
D.
PS> Of course I am tempted to send details of our hosting to them (www.ireckon.com), sometimes we might have busy bandwidth, not sure we have ever 509′d our customers.
This is exactly the type of thing Google is trying to solve with its new Google App Engine. Too many companies just don’t ‘get’ how much pressure can be put on web servers when demand increases.
I’ll bet a lot of companies haven’t actually fully load tested their applications, which is important because then you can put safeguards in place to say when server load reaches X, show a ’sorry huge demand come back later’ message. This is far better than a 509, and is kinda cool as a reader of a website to see the ’sorry huge demand’ message because you KNOW the content you are trying to read is popular and is going to be worth reading. I see it happen often on Toms Hardware when a new review for the latest and greatest video card comes out …EVERYONE jumps on and their servers get hit hard, but it’s not a problem because they just show a ’sorry come back later’ message, which to me is fine, but Google seems to have found a way to fix even this, which we all take as acceptable / best practice server behaviour. Always innovating. I can’t wait for the future of the web
Comment by Cogman — April 10, 2008 @ 9:38 am