That moment my landing page crashed during a product launch

I was sitting in my home office in Portland last Tuesday, ready to flip the switch on a new ebook I'd been promoting for 3 weeks. The email blast went out at 10 AM sharp and within 5 minutes my landing page completely froze. People were clicking the link but getting a white screen instead of the order form. I panicked for a solid 2 minutes before I remembered my hosting plan could barely handle 50 visitors at once. I quickly switched to a cached version of the page using a backup plugin I had installed but never tested. It worked well enough that sales started trickling in again, but I lost the first 30 minutes of peak traffic. I ended up selling 120 copies instead of the 200 I projected. Has anyone else dealt with a hosting bottleneck during a launch?

2 comments

2 Comments

aaron7401d ago

A cached backup would've saved me too but I never bothered setting one up.

the_rowan1d ago

It's funny how that works with so many things though. Like, I never back up my phone photos until I drop it in a puddle, or I never write down a recipe until I forget the one ingredient that made it perfect. It's like we all live in this weird space where we know we should prepare for something but talk ourselves out of it until it's too late.