From The Bruery:
Good morning everyone! Thank you so much for making Black Tuesday as ridiculous of a day as usual. Most of you know that we've been spending a lot of time and money to make our eCommerce system run faster and smoother and most of you also know that it was pretty much a dud yesterday morning when Black Tuesday went on sale. Believe us when we say that we get no satisfaction out of seeing our site crash and our customers becoming upset.
Our goal at The Bruery is to create exciting beer and along with that, to share that beer with as many people as we can. It sucks when the plan to share the beer becomes an issue. Luckily, we have an amazing collection of supporters who stuck with our slowly crawling website throughout the day and we ultimately were able to get Black Tuesday into the hands of more people than ever before.
We certainly can't guarantee that we'll have a perfectly working site next year, but we can guarantee that we'll reexamine our current processes so that sharing our beer is easier in the future.
Thank you so much for sticking it out yesterday, and for those who were able to purchase some Black Tuesday, we hope you have the chance to share it with your friends and family over this upcoming holiday season.
Cheers!
Everyone at The Bruery
**for the tech people out there - we'll be discussing the issues with our developers over the next few days and will hopefully put up some more detailed information on where the problems lie. We know that many of you have solutions, but best to see the true problems first!
Further Updates from 1 Nov 2013
Our goal at The Bruery is to create exciting beer and along with that, to share that beer with as many people as we can. It sucks when the plan to share the beer becomes an issue, as it did earlier this week with our Black Tuesday 2013 online sale.
Thought the site initially failed us, it did eventually start working, and thanks to our amazing and patient fans we were then able to get Black Tuesday into the hands of more people than ever before. We know how frustrating this was, and we are very sorry. We appreciate the flood of comments offering advice and support, so we felt it appropriate to give you guys an outline of what happened this year.
As some of you may be aware, we switched to a new eCommerce system at the beginning of this year.
We had our share of issues throughout the year with stressed product launches, and worked closely with our vendor to address the problems. At a certain point it became clear that our vendor did not have the ability to provide what we needed on their systems, so we switched to a new company for both hosting and consulting.
They were able to provide a more scalable solution to add resources during planned high volume releases in order to address the problems that we had been having. The original problem being faced was the ability to handle the sheer number of users attempting to access the site at the same time. By separating server roles, increasing memory and processor resources (by more than 10 times in some cases), and setting up a load balanced web cluster, we were able to eliminate this bottleneck.
Unfortunately, by fixing that problem it just introduced another problem which is the database. After extensive testing it became evident that the current shopping cart platform we are utilizing is not well suited for handling a large number of concurrent visitors, and there is not much that can be done to extend its functionality to do so. Adding more hardware resources proved to have little gain as the issue is not with the power of the servers but the efficiency and design of the code.
We are currently evaluating our options, including the cost to switch to a different platform that can handle the load, however no decision has been made yet.
Believe us when we say that we get no satisfaction out of seeing our site crash and our customers become upset. We certainly can't guarantee that we'll have a perfectly working site next year, but we can guarantee that we'll reexamine our current processes so that sharing our beer is easier in the future.
Until then, we hope you enjoy this year's release as much as we do!
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