Online bidding fails and auction is postponed until next week.
Running domain name auctions is hard. Promoting an auction and handling the technical back end is even harder.
Just ask Rick Latona.
Today Domain Madness was supposed to hold its third annual auction on the new Boxcar platform. Unfortunately the platform wilted under the pressure. I logged in an hour after the auction was supposed to start, only to see organizers call it quits.
Auction organizers said there were 1,500 simultaneous users, which was simply too much for the system to handle.
That’s a lot more users than I think even the big, long running auctions get. I hope it wasn’t a case of some sort of purposeful attack.
It’s always unfortunate to see technology snafus derail auctions. I wish the Boxcar team the best of luck getting this figured out by next week.
Jacob says
I mean really, they said 1500 people showing up for that domain list? I find that very hard to believe.
Rob Sequin says
I’m no server expert but I’m pretty sure you can buy lots of server space at Amazon’s cloud for pennies.
Jim May says
I am a server expert and I call BS. Either they bought a 1mhz cloud server or their mysql indexes are horrible. But there is no way they had 1500 people on the site at the same time. They site was still slow about 12 hours later once everybody started posting that the auction didn’t happen. But today it’s much faster. Either they upgraded to a 2mhz proc or they fixed their mysql indexes.