Posted in
Outages on November 27th, 2008 by Pingdom
Dr. Pepper decided to offer everyone in America a free bottle of soda (something they had promised to do if the new Guns n’ Roses album was released this year). All people had to do was to register for a free coupon on the Dr. Pepper website.
Now here comes the twist: Dr. Pepper had time limited the offer to just one day, and there are more than 300 million people in the United States. And we all know people love free stuff.
The resulting onslaught of visitors crashed the Dr. Pepper website and it remained unavailable for large parts of the day (last Sunday). In the end they had to extend the offer an extra day and add more server capacity to handle the load.
Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge made a very good observation, “How do you plan for capacity when you make a free offer to 300 million people? Perhaps limiting it to a one-day offer was not such a great idea in the first place.”
No, perhaps not. Here is a traffic graph for the Dr. Pepper website (from Alexa), clearly showing the rather extreme traffic spike it got:
Now the question is, was this an honest miscalculation or a marketing stunt? It sure got people talking…
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2010 by Pingdom
Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.
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Posted in
Main on February 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.
There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!
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Posted in
Pingdom on February 4th, 2010 by Pingdom
Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.
Enter our new “report banners”.
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Posted in
Main on February 1st, 2010 by Pingdom
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.
One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)
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Posted in
Main on January 29th, 2010 by Pingdom
The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?
To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.
So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.
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Gern Blanston
December 1st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Next time instead of running IIS on Windows, they’ll wise up and use something meant to handle that kind of onslaught..the Sun CoolThreads boxes. Oh and think of the (non-existent) licensing costs, too!
Chris
December 1st, 2008 at 9:44 pm
IIS on Windows isn’t why they crashed. It’s because they hadn’t planned on that many people actually going on their website. Sun will go down just as easy if it’s not setup to handle such large traffic. Check that graph. The traffic they had was 10x what they had. From .01 to .1. Which is massive.
Leyton Jay
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:22 am
Doing it across several days would’ve been much better, a) because the server stress is more manageble and b) because if people think you’re trying to screw them by offering it only on one day they will be doubly determined to download the coupon through spite.