Movies.com: When a sale hits these days, it's always an instant clustercuss and the servers take a huge hit. What steps are you guys taking to solve that problem?
Justin: We pay the most money... when we go to web designers and we say we're paying this amount, they lose their minds. Their like, "Nobody pays that amount of money a month!" We were on six and now we're on ten servers, and we have an independent web guy that oversees our website. We've got another group out of Sacramento that does stuff, and then we have the main company that hosts everything. We maxed out their service plan. They had to make a new service plan for us. There's nothing out there that can support it. If there was a perfect site out there, we'd definitely use it.
Billion-dollar companies-- Nike, for example, their sites are crashing when they release Jordans and they're a billion-dollar company. It happens to other companies that sell out instantly, and we're even talking to some of their developers. We're actively looking for people to build something that doesn't even exist so it can support the traffic. And even then, people are saying don't expect it to be perfect. When you have thousands of people refreshing-- we almost have a million page views a day because people just sit there refreshing all day, so that's a huge, huge hit on a website.
Mitch: We're really trying. That's not to say we have unprecedented traffic, that's just kind of a limitation of ecommerce in general. We have talked to a number of web designers and it's a matter of so many transactions happening at once when the sale actually happens and it hits the database. The site can handle thousands of people just sitting on it until the sale happens, but then once the database gets pinged when the sale happens... like Justin was saying, everyone in this business we've talked to has said, "I don't know what to do to help you." We've been looking all over.
Justin: Honestly, for years. And the problem is if we move to something and it ends up being worse, we're stuck with that. We know the limitations. People are mad because they had it in their cart and couldn't get it, but we're upfront about that. There's a disclaimer on every page that says, "You do not have this poster unless you checkout and get a confirmation." And yet, people still act surprised when they have it in their cart but still don't have it. We try to tell everyone, super up front, this is how the site works, this is what's going to happen.
It happens to a lot of sites out there. Like we talked about earlier, Mitch and I tried to buy Jordans and were literally on their site for four hours. On Jordan drop nights, Finish Line, Footlocker, all those sites are crashed. Ours you can see it, theirs is down; white screen, this site does not exist-- and those are billion dollar companies. That type of traffic on any site is going to cause some kind of slowing or some kind of weird reaction from when you're on it on a non-drop day.
We know it happens. We've had artists, like Olly Moss, see if he can do it, and he's never been able to do it. I remember one time I told Mitch when we were going to release the poster, and he tried to do it and couldn't get one. There's no trick to it. It's random drop times, and it's totally random if you can get one or not. We're trying to make the best of what we can with what we have right now until we can get something built, but even when they say, "Yes, we can build you a custom site, but it won't be perfect and it will still slow down." I think the average the web guys said last time was, on a giant drop day like Avengers stuff, we're averaging 200 transactions a minute and they said they've never seen that before.
Mitch: I think the bottom line is we're trying our very best to find a better solution, we're just not finding answers from the people we've talked to
At least I'll try!
