Meryl's Notes Blog

mLife ran an ad during the SuperBowl, but the company forgot to do one thing… prepare for the onslaught of traffic to its Web site. Shortly after the ad debutted, the site crashed because it couldn’t handle the traffic jam. When 9/11 happened, I remember having trouble getting to a news site… any news site because they were all slow and loaded with surfers like me wanting to know what happened.

Granted, no one could have predicted 9/11 (aside from the politics with intelligence information), but mLife could have been prepared. Traffic is a tricky thing since it can shoot for the stars once in a blue moon and you don’t want to spend the extra dough just for those occasions. So what can you do?

Lay siege to your Web server is one thing you can do. Another is to keep line wide open with marketing so you know of any upcoming campaigns and prepare for them. What about the unknowns like when you’re slashdotted or gnomed? That’s where testing the server is handy. Any other tips that worked for you? [ InformIT ]