Horror Stories in Web Hosting:
LOFT and Ann Taylor , 2011
As we saw in Part 1 of our Cyber Monday Hosting Series, even powerhouse retailers can experience nightmare scenarios over the holidays if they don’t choose a provider with well developed high traffic hosting solutions. In Part 2 we provide yet another disaster story — one that happened to LOFT and Ann Taylor in 2011.
Download our eBook with the 10 questions you need to be asking your hosting provider to avoid Cyber Monday horror stories and ensure your have a high traffic hosting solution that suits your needs.
What happened?
Ann Taylor sends out a 50% off coupon the day before Cyber Monday. The company also sends out a reminder Cyber Monday morning. Customers go online first thing Monday morning to take advantage of the promotion and find out that the site has already crashed and that the Ann Taylor social media team is hard at work apologizing for the incident. Social media team use phrases like “Sorry for the inconvenience” and “Thanks for your patience,” which infuriates people. Their resolution was to offer the discount in store, which does little for online shoppers.
Source: Facebook
What was the cause?
The site couldn’t handle the spike in traffic and crashed just as soon as the one-day promotion started. Apparently, this isn’t the first time for this company and is quite a common occurrence.
How much was lost?
This one is a hard one to put a value on, because not only did they lose sales on this day alone, but because of their neglect to remedy the situation the first time, not to mention the way they dealt with it, they lost something larger –- customer trust. Due to their lack of empathy and their insincere responses they appeared to NOT be taking the issue seriously and probably lost a lot of customers –- at least Cyber Monday customers that day.
Source: Facebook
Quality high traffic hosting solutions help you avoid disasters
By contacting their hosting provider, the company could have ensured their high traffic hosting solutions suited the Cyber Monday spike in traffic and ensuring that they were prepared provide hosting for high traffic websites. The provider could have performed a load test to ensure that the servers could handle the spike in traffic and also have a back-up plan in case of emergency. Sadly, this shouldn’t have happened at all, especially on Cyber Monday, and considering that it happened before, they should have learned from their mistakes. Click here to download an ebook that will help you make sure your hosting provider is ready for Cyber Monday.
In Part 3 of our blog series, we examine what happens when a bank fails to prepare for the busiest shopping day of the year.