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.
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 
So guys, when are you going to turn on the new servers? :lol: :lol:
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.
And now its closed
I bet the whole team is hard at work today.
How about the side bet? did anyone guess that the whole thing would be over before it begun?
Proteus:
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.
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…” :lol:
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
Sucks for repeat customers. Guess i can go on ebay and see all the stuff that people got who didnt deserve it.
tell me about it… my boss just moved a meeting until… wait for it… 11 eastern… sigh
It does suck to think (know?) that some people will try to re-sell their stuff while there’s those that genuinely want some items to be able to do something with it. 
I can imagine the headache the people trying to keep the servers running are going through. This kinda reminds me of black Friday, but on the internet.
smedoz:
Sucks for repeat customers. Guess i can go on ebay and see all the stuff that people got who didnt deserve it.
I looked over the Free Day rules - I didn’t see anything about anyone deserving it more than anyone else.
not to knock them at all… I think this was a fabulous idea but I can’t help but wonder if a coupon code that worked for people who have bought from the site before wouldn’t have worked out better. Of course, that would have done nothing to help new enthusiasts or expand their customer base which the current program is sure to do…
jswilson64:
smedoz:
Sucks for repeat customers. Guess i can go on ebay and see all the stuff that people got who didnt deserve it.I looked over the Free Day rules - I didn’t see anything about anyone deserving it more than anyone else.
I think he means people who are getting stuff with the purpose of reselling.
Dangit, guess I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up too much, I knew it was too good to be true. I had been looking through the store all week at the cool stuff they have.
DeadlyFoez:
Unfortunately I can’t push people out of my way on the internet without doing something illegal.
That’s probably a good thing, at least we won’t see on the news how someone got trampled at the entrance, although I can already see keyboard and or monitor sales going up from people who took out their anger on them… :lol:
I’m actually finding this to be somewhat humorous and it’s kinda cool to be able to talk to others about it as it happens. I was actually thinking to myself earlier how this event will probably go down in history among electronic enthusiasts as the day the internet stood still. :lol:
dude, relax. Its not about one person deserving more than the other, everyone should have an opportunity to get stuff, just sux that this is just like getting tix on ticketmaster, the scalpers get online and buy all the tickets, and then I have to buy them for more than face on ebay later. (last time i went to macy’s to avoid the online debacle, but the printer got jammed right before me, so i got screwed anyawy) although i guess in this case i can just buy stuff from sparkfun tomorrow, with no added above the line cost, but it is still bs that the site is chocked from people that propably won’t actually use the stuff they get. Maybe next time i should read the rules.
DeadlyFoez:
Either way, I am buying a hot air station, whether I get the $100 free or not. I was looking around to buy one anyways when I stumbled upon sparkfun.I can’t wait to see the results about the amount of traffic it created. They should quickly rent a server.
I do beleive they installed 5 new servers to avoid this, check the site when the rush is over.
DNS Issues
And I have nothing to do except hit refresh and hope for a miracle…
I think they should cancel free day for today, learn from what happened and reschedule!