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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…
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Main,
Mobile podcast on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.
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Main on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.
So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.
Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.
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Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!
For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.
Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.
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Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.
As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.
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Main on February 7th, 2012 by Pingdom
In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
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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.