SparkFun Forums

[iharris]

Yup. It's getting absolutely caned. Tomorrow at 9am mountain it's going to be virtually impossible to buy anything.

[unsped]

it will be ironic that after giving away 100,000 dollars in free stuff there is a high probability that the net result will be:

1) new unlikely to be repeat customers with multiple accounts and scripts will get the majority of sales, the majority of those will be resold.

2) loyal customers will spend hours staring at a blank webpage that won't load, be late for work/school ultimately give up and be mad at sparkfun for how poorly the thing was run and ultimately have a worse opinion of the company.

i applaud them for trying but i think the growing pains might sting a bit. i think it probably should have been a lottery system where winners had a 'day' to redeem the codes (tying the code to an account or shipping address)

however if you think about it maybe the sparkfun crew are very smart, if its slammed all day and it ends at 11pm they might only give away 20-30 dollars worth of stuff

in all seriousness best of luck to you guys!

[leon_heller]

There's another three hours or so to go, and the site is *very* slow. I thought of putting a couple of items in my cart and seeing if I can get them for free, but I've got better things to do with my time.

Leon

[Philipf]

Its stopped for me, nothing loading except the forum.

[TheDirty]

Can't get to the site at all right now.

I put a couple things in a basket last night when I could get in. We'll see what happens in two hours.

[Philipf]

Can't get to the site at all right now.

I put a couple things in a basket last night when I could get in. We'll see what happens in two hours.

My cart has somehow emptied itself today. Only after a couple of xbees to play with, did have a $250+ order but I cant even add stuff now

[Philipf]

So guys, when are you going to turn on the new servers?

[Kilrah]

Yup, don't have much hope..
From past experiences with that kind of actions, you can't even remotely hope a couple of servers in the office to keep up, you need to get some company with worldwide cloud computing facilities to run the site during the event if you want it to work smoothly.

[Philipf]

And now its closed

I bet the whole team is hard at work today.

[Proteus]

How about the side bet? did anyone guess that the whole thing would be over before it begun?

[TheDirty]

How about the side bet? did anyone guess that the whole thing would be over before it begun?

LOL! I should have put my guess in for the contest.

[kibble]

I had previously known about SparkFun and had always wanted to order some stuff from here, just haven't had the funds. I read about the freeday event several days ago and thought it would be awesome! I had a feeling something like this would happen though and I think what someone had said on one of the comments sounds about right: ".....SparkFun auto DDoS itself...."

[Kilrah]

Yup... such an action can be a great marketing event, both because people talk about it, because people use the occasion to order more (paid) stuff as well, etc... but it MUST work, or all you end with is a lot of frustrated customers, from which the new ones might not even come back because of it, and missed sales because people simply couldn't place orders...

It's no problem if the "grant" goes in 10 minutes, but it must work smoothly for everyone or it's a dud...

Oh well, we'll see what they manage to deactivate to speed things up, but I'm pretty sure their servers are overwhelmed by orders of magnitude at this point.
The first reason is thrashing, as soon as the system can't keep up and starts to fall it will get increasing numbers of requests from people trying to reload every 5 seconds, which makes it fail even more,...
Need insane resources that can seem way over board, but that way you're sure it doesn't plow.
And if you can give $100k of gifts away, you can throw an extra $10k to get hosting for the event that matches the budget

[smedoz]

Sucks for repeat customers. Guess i can go on ebay and see all the stuff that people got who didnt deserve it.

[sirscott71]

tell me about it... my boss just moved a meeting until... wait for it.... 11 eastern... *sigh*