SpinDrah:
wow what a disappointment, But its not that surprising, they gave all the greedy kids time to set up multiple accounts and all the non- customers to get free stuff just to sell on ebay.but in the end long time customers like me cant even sign in
Oh poo on you.
more than 3 repeat clicks should knock you off for 5 min
I had my cart open for a second, tried to check out and…nothingness. I’m not really upset about it, and I suppose nobody should be. We all expected this. If I don’t get it, I’ll buy it just the same-- but I’ll wait till tomorrow.
So is the forum hosted onsite as well?
Seems to be no issue with bandwidth here, but not on the website.
I did get to my cart, and hit checkout, but now timeout…
Oh, and I’ve been watching Sparkfun.com for awhile, just haven’t had the chance to order…
Mark
kibble:
Can you imagine all the mouse clicks that happened right around 9:00 MST?
I’ve got nothing to click on! Just a timeout error. 
no luck for me… cart was full - can’t checkout… gotta head to a meeting now… oh well… maybe it will still be down when I am done! 
Well… it’s refresh time…
TRON:
Actually they're hosting all the servers at a data center, did you not see the news post about it last week?Kilrah:
Don't say that too loud, they just bought 5 to host the site in-house. ;)DeadlyFoez:
They should quickly rent a server.But yes, they’d need 100 of them for something like that…
Also sites like slashdot have no problems running off of fewer than 10 servers with thousands of users because they implement a throttling policy of basically if you hammer the server cluster you get banned for an hour.
It's people like you who are causing the problem in the first place and if they had implemented the throttling as suggested above then you would be one of many to be temporarily banned for hamming the server cluster.KreAture:
And I have nothing to do except hit refresh and hope for a miracle…
I resent that acusation.
I hit refresh, and in 4 minutes Explorer times out. Then I hit refresh again.
I wouldn’t call it hammering.
Sucks that the site is down, but I still give mad props to SFE for even trying this.
Whoever thought of this idea is a marketing genius. Regardless of whether you get a free $100, SFE only had to spend $100,000 to get over a million eyeballs on their products. No marketing firm in America can promise that for 10 times as much.
The real question now becomes: Now that those products might not be free, are you just gonna walk away? Maybe today. But you’ll be back…
Pure genius.
Loaded the main page a minute ago, the bar at the top was still at 0.00$ ha ha
Hey… the banner rendered here… 175$ given away… congrats to the 2 people who managed to make it to the checkout =)
it’s $100k of value for customers, but not $100k on spending for SFE. My best guess is that’s well below 25k, excluding new IT spending.
Even if I’m not able to get anything today, I’m coming back when I have the funds. They have a bunch of cool stuff I’d like to get my grubby mits on!
looking in my title bar and something finally loads… a blank white screen.
Proteus:
Hey… the banner rendered here… 175$ given away… congrats to the 2 people who managed to make it to the checkout =)
So it was THEM that were tying up the checkout line! LOL, lucky people indeed!
well i cant say this is the best execution of a sale idea ive ever seen
KofS:
well i cant say this is the best execution of a sale idea ive ever seen
But it’s a fantastic execution of a site capacity and load test.
in all fairness… they didn’t quite know what to expect. its not like they’ve done this before
be patient
^it’s not like ANYONE has done this before.
TRON:
Also sites like slashdot have no problems running off of fewer than 10 servers with thousands of users because they implement a throttling policy of basically if you hammer the server cluster you get banned for an hour.
You do that for a site that runs normally 24/7 at a standard pace, yes. But NOT when you actually call thousands of users to actually hit you simultaneously on purpose. As a customer, I want to place an order, it’s not my fault if they can’t set up sufficient resources and I can’t even get the page to load. So I will retry until it works. If they ban me from it, then it’s unfair, everybody should get the same chances.
So, you DO set up the required resources, end of.