Preparing for and Dealing with Websites Imploding

The lessons learned with dealing with the constant growth and high traffic situations of ColourPop. We have seen extreme growth and extreme traffic, not only traffic, but traffic that is converting and placing orders on a site with an already massive (100GB) database and struggles to stay online with multiple orders per second being placed.

Success in emergency situations does not happen by accident, we’ve failed many times before we succeeded and still fail sometimes even with preparation. This talk will cover how to handle yourself, the site, and the overall situation of when your site is experiencing high traffic and is failing. As well as how to prepare in advance for these situations, and how to de-compress afterwards.

While the talk will be general on how to handle things, it will use a real world examples such as my WordCamp Chicago 2016 experience. ColourPop decides to do an unannounced, unplanned, more importantly un-hyped flash sale that weekend, when I am attending the conference. We experience more traffic in that sale than we have. From that moment the rest of my conference visit was spent ensuring we kept ColourPop online – which first failed, and then we found creative solutions to maintain stability.

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