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Free Day is Done
by Nate |
January 04, 2010 |
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Wow that was fast! Free Day is over. Over $100k was given away in just under 1 hour and 45 minutes. We had over 1,000 orders and nearly over 70,000 unique visitors. Our servers barely stayed up!
Thank you all for checking us out! Our sincerest apologies to all who came but were not able to get the discount. We are going to have a ton of graphs, images, numbers, and funny comments from Free Day on a Friday Recap home page post just as soon as we can get it together. Please check back soon!
Thank you all for checking us out! Our sincerest apologies to all who came but were not able to get the discount. We are going to have a ton of graphs, images, numbers, and funny comments from Free Day on a Friday Recap home page post just as soon as we can get it together. Please check back soon!
It seems like it was just last week when we announced SparkFun Free Day and now it is almost upon us! Free Day is coming in just a few short days - Thursday, January 7th, 2010, to be exact.
For those of you unfamiliar with SparkFun's Free Day (see the original post here), here it is in a nutshell. Starting at 9AM MST (that's 11 AM EST) on Thursday, January 7th, 2010, each customer will receive $100 towards their order until we reach a limit of $100,000. You'll have to take care of shipping.
There really are no catches, but there are a few rules for fairness' and logistic's sake:
- $100 max per person (cheating kills kittens)
- You pay shipping
- Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the
day
- Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
- Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
- Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed
- There is no special code to type in. But you get only one order on Free Day, so spend it well!
- Only one $100 credit per household. We ask that you respect this limit and don't try to abuse this gift.
- There is no minimum or maximum order. You can spend more than $100, the balance of which will be charged to your method of payment.
- Only Credit Card and Paypal orders will be eligible for the $100 credit. We don't want to have people tying up inventory with POs, wire transfers, checks in the mail, or lost faxes.
- You will see whether or not your order qualifies for a credit in the checkout process.
- Free Day does not apply to our distributors. Sorry!
- Gift Cards cannot be bought on Free Day.
- Any returns from Free Day will be exchanged for the same item.
- Every order isn't going to ship on Free Day, or for a few days after. We've got extra tape guns on hand, but please be patient and give us some time to catch up!
- We are ratcheting up inventory for Free Day, but backorders (a.k.a. rainchecks) are allowed on most items (some items we simply can't get anymore). We'll get you your goodies just as soon as we can get them back in stock.
Remember, if you want to stay home and in bed that day, you can always participate in Free Day by placing a side bet when you think Free Day will expire ($100k reached). Closest time without going over wins $200 credit. We currently have around 1000 guesses. I thought it was going to last 2-3 hours, but from the looks of the site traffic, twitter responses, and forum posts it may be much, much shorter.
Sorry Hawaii! Free Day will start awfully early at 6AM.
Sorry kids in school! Tell your teacher. Maybe they'll let you out of class for an educational cause.
Sorry office job people. You'll just have to fake like you're working (who, me?).
We'll be hanging out in the public SparkFun IRC channel on Thursday morning so please stop by and say 'hi'.
Please stop by SparkFun on Friday the 8th. We'll try to have a recap with data, graphs, and a breakdown of just how big things got.
Here's what you can expect to see at checkout:
Click for the full image. It will be vary obvious if you can checkout and get the discount. If not, the page will state that Free Day is over. What does 'may qualify' mean? Hit the Free Day submit button and your order will be tested. If approved, we'll tell you. If not, you'll be returned to the checkout page where you can edit your order or just submit the order like normal.
EDIT FROM FRENCIL:
Wow!
Our site has been up and down today from the unprecedented load we're seeing. We're tuning our entire site, top to bottom and inside and out to handle this torrent. We're also shaving off a few features of the website (temporarily) to make everything faster, such as rating comments. After Free Day has passed we'll re-enable everything we've disabled to weather the storm.
Feel free to join the conversation on our public irc channel: irc.freenode.net #sparkfun
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Uhm, no. You mean 17:00 (5PM) probably.
That said, I'm in Melbourne, Australia, and I'll be up bright and early at 3am to put my order in :)
Now I suppose I'll have to have an atomic clock sitting by my side Thursday morning to keep me on track so I could ninja checkout before everybody else does. ;)
Sam R.
Great thing about university is the fact that you can skip whatever classes you want! I really hope I get the bluetooth modules I have in my cart! They would really help me with my new project :)
or time.nist.gov?
Both my girlfriend and I who live together are Electrical Engineers (ie: geeks) both with our own robot projects (and Sparkfun accounts) yet we only get one free day? (and I want a $99 GPS, so "splitting" is kind of hard) Sparkfun, i never thought you would be the cause of a big fight with my girlfriend. :-(
- Tim.
Don't even care if I get a $100 of it for free or not, just hitting SUBMIT at 10:00:00.000001 (my time) will be fun enough.
But the real fun won't start for about another week when that beautiful package from Colorado shows up on my doorstep from Sparc.
Wait a minute..
You mean this isn't SparcPhun?
I wonder if the clowns over there at Sparc ever thought about having a 'Free Day'.
(BTW - Clowns = Lawyers)
The whole thing is thoroughly awesome. Big inspiration to a bunch of kids out here in rural Pennsylvania.
Or do we have to wait until after 9:00MST to fill up our cart?
Thanks!
Sam R.
Like eelpark asked, exactly how far into the checkout process can we get before 9:00?
It's real nice that you guys are doing this. It allows a lot of people to expand or get started doing projects.
*Syncs atomic clock*
Just one question though, how much does traffic does a average order make?
-Matthew
"http://http//www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=263"
-Matthew
When try for the discount, your order will ONLY go through if you do in fact get the full discount. If for any reason you do not get the discount (your credit card is declined, Free Day has suddenly ended, you already placed a Free Day order, etc.) you'll return to the confirmation page and no order will have been placed.
I heard about freeday from Tekzilla
I am going to use mine on 6 of the .8ah battery packs and chargers for a dell netbook external battery pack im working on.
I have an old external Hd case that i gutted.
I was planning on putting an mk es2.3 12v battery inside and then using a regular cig lighter adpater to power my devices.
My new plan is to use 3 of the .8ah batts making roughly 11.4+ volts. I can fit all 6 batteries in the case so i wll have a switch to go between the two packs.
I am new to this battery stuff and i heard someone in the comments of one of the batteries that said something to the effect of not discharging the batteries in series because they dont have the same internal resistance. To me it seems the problem would only be in the charging in series but i dont plan to do that. I will open the case and charge them individually. I will also leave the original leads on each pack when i wire them up so that i can still charge them.
peace
Maybe I'll even have the class help me break through the horrible slashdot effect that morning.
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1262777265055RA96
Happy new year from Denmark.
/espo
Seriously though, what would be nice is to see a graph of the data bandwidth/number of "order shopping cart" requests for the duration of Free Day, with perhaps lines indicating the first free order and the last one, along with a line indicating the winner of the "guess when the 100 000$USD will be gone" poll?
Will you show us website traffic stats afterwards?
Thanks SparkFun guys, you are great!!!
Suggestion: after login, automatically redirect to unencrypted http:// instead of keeping https. This will reduce bandwidth and server load a lot.
I hope our carts will stay intact for that day and not get wiped... Im taking this opportunity to build my collection of soldering tools!
I love sparkfun!
It would be interesting also to have a look at how many active and full carts they are handling right now...
thanks for this sparkfun!
hopefully the site wont overload...
Only asking as England likes many money from tax. The last order I made was $35 and HM Customs took it as £35 and charged me £13 (~$20) on top.
Dave
It wouldn't be fun having to pay 40$ for customs on top of shipping charges for what is supposed to be 100$ of free stuff...
Carts will be cleared after Free day officially starts?
I'm planning to leave my car ready to checkout before. ;-)
On another note, I would like to see a gifting idea with development boards. IE: Free resistors/capacitors/wires/etc. if you get one on Free Day.
...but this will be a spectacle to behold
It wouldn't be fun having to pay 40$ for customs on top of shipping charges for what is supposed to be 100$ of free stuff...
totally agree with that and hope the SparkFun staff consider this awesome idea
This is better than black Friday and....... No riots!
This is almost like getting a grant for school or Venture Capital even.
This is me nutting up...
Thank you sooo much, even if I don't get my order subsidized, it's the thought that counts, yes?
It wouldn't be fun having to pay 40$ for customs on top of shipping charges for what is supposed to be 100$ of free stuff...
I also agree with this idea!
That way I can tell my wife, "You see, I had to order all of this in order to get $100 free!"
; ^ )
"Goods sent as a gift that are over £36 in value are liable to import VAT. Customs duty also becomes payable if the value of the goods is over £120 but is waived if the amount of duty calculated is less than £7."
http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageTravel_ShowContent&id=HMCE_CL_000014&propertyType=document#P32_2450
What does that mean?
Is there any fixed percentage that i could use to calculate it?
i found 2.5% off the link you gave?
Thanks.
Are you guys insanely AWESOME or what? :D
Best electronics company in my book!
All UK postal/courier services also throw on a handling charge of at least £10.
Why can they not be marked as gift, when it is infact a gift?
I helped crash
the new servers on
SparkFun Free Day!
01/07/2010 09:00MST
Good luck SparkFun! I'm in I.T. myself... I feel your frustration...and fear. :-)
BTW,
YOU GUYS ROCK!
I think an even better idea, much more 'sneaky' idea, would've been to do the same sort of 'Free Day' thing, but not advertise it until after the fact.
I think that would separate the real hobbyists from those types that are just what I said above...types that always expect something for nothing...
Call me a pessimist, but I expect a handful of those greedy people to completely and totally ruin it for the rest of us.
Good luck to the team that'll be keeping up the servers. I'll be playing by the rules listed above. Nothing read into them, nothing read between the lines, start punching in my order at the appointed time, and when I get my roughly $300 of stuff loaded in the cart, if I get $100 off of the total...Great! If not, oh well, I'll still get a handful of parts after a week or so...
Does it tell them that they get the credit but say that they only get $53.28 of credit? Or will it say that they get the credit and not tell them how much? Or will it just outright reject them?
SIR i need to send asic commands data (very short distance and require low data rate )
can i use
XBee 1mW Wire Antenna
sku: WRL-08665
as transmitter and receiver?
if yes then i purchase pair of wrl-08665
kindly explain your answer..?
i am waiting ur answer to enjoy the offer
I love people with humor! :D
Looking forward to this afternoon (in the UK)!
Please don't tell me that they're a couple of those ultra bright 5 watt LEDs you carry ;)
I'm not going for those free packages. Instead, I'm putting my money on the 'guess when free day money runs out' thing.
btw, that counter's a nice touch.
Thanks guys... I normally buy from your Australiain distributors... but they can't match this deal!
Thanks Sparkfun
I have a good feeling about tomorrow
so forgive my ignorance, but is it required to have a fedex account to use them as shipping?
the wording wasn't very clear
Lets remember what SparkFun is doing for us!
however...
I'm still worried about the international shipping stuff.
If my invoice exceeds $50, I will have to pay custom taxes of 97% over total value.
I agree with declaring $0,00 for items under $100,00 + shipping. This would make Free Day more like 'global'.
I think that as a 'not-earning-amounts-of-money-yet' student, unfortunally I can't agree with "Just think of it this way, you're still paying $100 less", since I don't even have the other $100 to pay custom tariffs + shipping
...
I'm here with you... Australia that is, Sydney infact... :)
Huge disappointment. Was hoping to start my Arduino project this month
Your IT group should be fired.
Made it to check out several times only to be denied due to server time out.
Oh well...interesting site and I may be back.
Jin
i was not able to connect
;)
Could have limited by current customers or at least broke it down by time zone, or zip to give people a chance, not all of us are on the fastest ISPs.
Have been here since 9AM MST but never got my order through. If your servers can't cope with the pressure and only lets a few lucky customers through then it's better that you don't have a "free" day at all
When free day started, was't able untill now to connect to this site.
Fair change for everyone, heads up
This was an amazing thing you did SparkFun! I will continue to be a customer for a long time, even though my internet connection at work sucks and I didn't get my $100 of free awesomeness.
I'm very impressed with this whole event and very much appreciate the opportunity to be a part of it. Sparkfun will continue to be my #1 source for all of my electronic needs.
Thank you soooooo much.
Online half hour before start...Check.
Watching official NIST MST clock...Check.
Try for hour and a half to pay for items...Check.
Actually get to order confirmation...Fail.
Oh well! Thank you SparkFun for your generosity, even though I could not take advantage of it. Truly awesome!
Sparkfun is a great shop with all kinds of interesting things and helpful staff. However, it makes you wonder if this was stage (not to complete an order). The the site was accessable right after it reached the limit of 100K $. Moreover, not even Santa would give a way 100K $ and this would be kinda economic suicide. Hopefuly I am mistaking.
Did anyone managed to complete an order?
Very sad, but I appreciate the offer for free stuff!
We know 1.000 customers had the chance to make the race but how many like me are really disapointed by the frustrating experience ? I guess far more as the traffic on the web site was huge enough to make it crash completely.
Had a shopping cart prepared last night, but couldn't even see a "checkout" button on the site from T-0h:30m to T+1h:30m. Didn't want to hammer the Retry button, but got as far as "Select Shipping Method" once at about T+1h:45m, by the time the give-away money ran out.
I would suggest that maybe next time (if nobody spoils the love and whines about your generosity), consider a lottery system; e.g., all unique qualifying shopping carts at the appointed time have a chance of getting a special coupon code added, which can be redeemed in the next 48 hours.
Barring that, I will mention that the ssl.google-analytics.com server was horrible, and it seems that many of your pages won't show key buttons like [Checkout] until the javascript gets back a reply. Unplug the content from all third-party server stuff like this, as well as the other "feature trimming" you mentioned.
Again, not TOO disappointed, it was a fun gamble. I'll just have to save my lunch money if I want that GPS module...
My new plan (as opposed to what I do every night, Pinky: Try To Take Over the WORLD!) will be to try and get a panel meter interfaced to a desktop with a rotary switch with at least 5 stops. That way I can make the case LOOK like an old tube radio and now have a dial that will actually work! So many steps...
o. Get an Arduino to run a Panel Meter
o. Get an Arduino to work with the switch
o. Make the Arduino interface with the computer
o. Maybe even throw in a few LEDs as dummy lights
Oh boy. I've got a LOT to learn!
Frnk!
I'm unemployed and this was a chance to get some stuff for me to hack on to keep my skills fresh. I don't have the money to buy at the regular costs so this really had me hoping.
Instead I'm out in the cold like so many others because SparkFun didn't realistically plan for this bandwidth crunch. And anybody who says they couldn't predict it is naive. I can bet quite a number of them know what the Slashdot effect is and what a DDoS is and could foresee the end results here.
FAIL SparkFun. FAIL.
And both of you brought up being unemployed. Go cry to somebody else. Just because you are unemployed doesn't make you any more deserving of parts than the other people. Spend your time finding a new job or going to education classes instead of wasting 3 hours on this site, then commenting and complaining. This was an open contest and you didn't win. Don't take it out on the people at SparkFun. The free parts were not a guarantee.
And secondly, I overcome a lot daily to even function. I have a chronic condition, so I pay for doctor's visits and medicine out of pocket. Along with rent, books, food, and a phone and internet bill. There's precious left over for anything that could be 'fun'.
So don't you dare insult me for having a little hope. This wasn't a contest- this was an offer. And I read the rules, got ready, then got clobbered off the server. That's a far shot from how you're playing it out to be. I never had a chance with this.
As for having a chance, you did. Everyone had a chance and most didn't get anything. It was a lottery of luck with the server. They don't owe you anything because they didn't guarantee you anything.
This was so not worth my time!
It's not about missing out on the free stuff. It's more about the frustration of dealing with the improved website as it failed.
What a waste of 2hrs. Would like to hear if anyone did get there order through.
Unfortunately I made it all of the way and then was told my order didn't qualify (I still don't know why I had all physical stuff, no gift cards or classes)). This was when only $16,000 was taken. Quite bummed. But Sparkfun still rocks.
The intention WAS GOOD, however theory is only 50%.
Maybe next time google has already developed a tool for this kind of situation.
Couldnt buy anything at all even that I was 3 clicks to go...
more luck for us next time.
nice idea, very generous, great publicity, but i bet you'd be borderline-upset like the rest of us if you hadn't gotten through.
Only odd thing for me was when I logged in I had 5 items in my cart.. when i hit chekout my cart was empty, oh well.
Thanks SparkFun!
I call shens.
Do you threaten to leave your cable/cellphone supplier when they offer amazing discounts to "new users" and leave the existing customers ignored?
Just food for thought.
Me? I didn't get in..so be it. I'm interested to see the stats to see who (and where) the successful candidates came from. One observation for anything similar in the future. A lot of the pages seemed to advance via a "javascript" button. This meant that not only did you have to be lucky enough to get the first page to render (without a timeout), but the javascript link would have to work as well... or you would be back to having to refresh the original page. As I understand it this means the user had to manage not one but two "successful" HTTP requests (in a row) in order to advance from one page to the next. Again.. something to think about should there be another (similar) event.
I was expecting SF to have something together, considering they played up their new servers.
What it boils down to was a first-shove-first-serve. I believe many people were waiting "in line" long before the start time, but once the time came (even a little before then) the servers were flooded. Why? Well, when you say you're giving away $100 to 1000 people, well, it draws attention.
I'm angry, yes. Will this turn me from SF? No. Regardless of fault, they're still a great website.
This could also help some IT guys get some ideas on how to run or a similar event better. Placeholders, maybe (click checkout, get a number and wait your turn, etc).
As a broke college student, this stuff would have been great for my growing workbench at home. I could have used every bit that was in my cart, but now I gotta spend my school grant money :p oh well
Perhaps people didn't realize that it was a lottery when they started.
Sure.. it would have been less stressful if you got a page within the first couple of seconds that said "you didn't win" versus "timeout trying to reach server", but ultimately it was the same result.
It was luck of the draw, period. Yes, it was frustrating but it was also completely fair and I'd say pretty damn random. The only advantage it seemed was how quickly you refreshed after the page timed out.
To those sparking: Please don't play if there is a next time.
Thanks for doing this SparkFun.
I took half a day off from work, just to look at the "timeout" screens.
Na... sounds like a cell phone add.
That said. You guys still have a great site and offer great products. I bought from you before Free Day and I will buy from you after Free Day.
Better luck next time
PS. It would be cool to see what projects come out of freeday items (I like to think that nobody got stuff just to turn around and sell it - that would make them a scumbag).
I'd rather have submitted a proposal of what I would do with $100 of parts and have the SparkFun staff pick out their favorite suggestions. Of course, I don't know how easy it would be for SparkFun to sift through multiple thousands of proposals and select a thousand winners....
Should I change my message of optimism: "I BELIEVE!"
For one of great disappointment: "I ALREADY KNOW!!!"
Thanks for the opportunity anyway! :)
Very poorly done and pathetically inept website.
Will not use sparkfun.com again if I can find parts elsewhere. Willl look elsewhere first.
This definitely left me with a bad feeling about sparkfun. I must admit I'm upset.
.. which is what the whole day was about. So why be so upset?
You opted to try/play the game. Nobody forced you to.
Again. Thanks.
---Bill Tuttle
I knew it might be tough to get in, but not that bad.
You know what might be neat next time (there will be a next time, right!?! :) ) is a Free Day week where you're randomly selected throughout the week for various discounts and give aways. Raises awareness, let's people buy but spreads the traffic out a bit.
Thanks guys for sponsoring this.
Wonder who won the side bet?
I think FREE Day is such a wonderful idea.. It's such a cool and generous way to support the hacking community... So thanks you for that..
That said.. I tried dutifully from the opening bell at 9MST to the closing bell just to finish my checkout on my $75, 3 item order .. and your server kept timing out. I was so excited when it finally came through only to find that 1the 100K had been reached.. I guess you know this.. but your servers wern't up to your generosity :-)
Again.. my admiration for what you did here more than offsets my frustration and disappointment that mine didn't get through. Thanks for thall us geeks !
-john c
Needless to say, I will not be placing any order. I'd never heard of sparkfun before this freeday thing. I hope I will not hear of them again.
time will tell.
but dang, servers didn't seem to handle a simple request to the home page coming form California on a Fiber back bone.
I've been waiting for a month for that. Knowing that it was going to be EXACTLY like this. That was the whole concept around the game. It took me 1h15min to get my stuff. It was fun.
Anyway, you guys are still great and I look forward to ordering the things in my cart when I have the cash.
And yes, I had my shopping cart ready since before Christmas.
Anyway, SparkFun still has the best price for the Nokia 3310 LCD, so I guess I'll order these anyway!
Good job, a bit disappointing for me (yes I missed out too), when will the side bet winner be announced?
You folks that are all irate about not getting your free stuff - Give it a rest, you were warned that this was a grand experiment! No guarantees were implied or expressed.
SF - I look forward to all of the graphs and tables, it should be enlightening.
Have fun,
DLC
Maybe I will get lucky next year if you are brave enough to try it again.
Looking forward to seeing the server stats.
Mark
I was re-submitting the "Submit this order to try the Free Day discount!" button from the time it was $35k all the way to the end.
And... Fail. :(
Sparkfun, you lost my heart.
Sure, I was waiting around for 2 hours trying to get connected, but regardless of whether I got the discount or not I was going to get some parts anyway.
I changed the LED on my mouse in between server timeouts. ;)
I'm a little bummed about the whole thing too (got to credit card page at $96k out), but I think it was to be expected and is the idea. A lot of people seem pretty pissed off they didn't get something for free. Seems to me like this whole event was a volunteer load test, and you should be happy if you got a bonus. If not, too bad. Nobody forced us to sit there.
I tried loading the Sparkfun website from prior to 9:00 MST and kept trying roughly twice a minute for a good 15 mins. Sometimes reclicking just to be sure, I then tried on and off for the next couple of hours, at least once every few minutes, and not once did the home page appear or indeed any direct links to login to my account. I couldn't even get close to placing an order.
I just kept receiving timeouts. I would wager the site is favouring connections from within the mountain timezone in the middle of the US, and indeed favouring everybody else inside the whole US over the rest of the world.
Not very fair really, and its not fair to get peoples hopes up either.
Don't get me wrong I would have really appreciated the $100 freebie and would definitely have bought from Sparkfun in future, now I'm not so enthusiastic about it for some reason.
:-(
Didn't manage to get through as your site was permanently down (trying from the UK). Google Trends showed that you wer No.1 in the UK list.Awesome!
Anyway, frustration aside, it gave me an opportunity to discover some products that I had not previously seen, which gave me some ideas for future projects, and that is a net "plus"...
I predict with in 60 seconds one of two things will happen:
1. Your servers will start failing to server some requests, but a few manage to get through and a few lucky people will land some free stuff. While your site is effectively down for 2-3 hours. This is fairly common behavior for a PHP/Apache stack. (best case)
2. Your server falls over miserably before 9am due to load.
So can the bet be when your server will fall down the first time OR the orders fulfilled. Because I'm thinking 8:45am.
At an rate, when I do have the available funds I'll probably order this stuff anyway.
But it's OK!
I mean it's Free Day. FREE! So not everyone should expect to get something. I just want to say thanks to Sparkfun for attempting something like this. And rest assured that I will still be buying stuff from them in the near future. Even if it is not FREE!
they could have accomplished the same thing with a $20 free day rather than $100.
It does however raise an interesting question: what is the net result of having a ridiculous number of people who previously did not know who you are learn about your site for $100,000, but with 99% of them having their only impression of your site being an hour or two of annoyance and frustration?
Neat idea, but yeah, it didn't seem to work out so well. Maybe next time a lottery for 1000 $100 coupons?
Your servers effectively DIDN'T stay up. It took me 15 minutes from 8:50 to 9:15 to log in. Another 7 minutes and I couldn't even open my shopping cart. I gave up then because I knew there were at least another 5 screens to go through. It seems like some people tried for almost 2 hours with the same results as I.
Look guys, this was a great idea but someone in your IT dept. should have known that this was going to happen. This was done quite irresponsibly. Promoting everyone to use the website at the exact same time when you know your servers/connection can't handle the strain. That's only going to cause people to become upset with you.
Other commenters, no, I'm not upset when I don't win the lottery, but that's not the case here. This was billed as "log on at 9:00, the site will be pretty slow, but it'll get through, and you'll get $100 of free stuff as long as you're early about it". Instead it should have been, "log on at 9:00 and sit at your computer re-entering the same information for over an hour and a half and you MIGHT get something".
I bet there are more than 1,000 happy people out there... and the site was hammered ... :-)
I think you could get the same effect if you did it for $25 each at 100,000 max or even a particular item free for x number of orders :-) (note this was a hint that I wasn't one of the lucky people ... couldn't even "checkout" with all my items in the cart from yesterday)
this was fun... but now that I have to beg the wife for approval on the items in my cart :-)
BTW my side bet was 09:02:44 but I forgot about the lag on the site :-)
Well, Thank you very much SparkFun, I got my dicount.
I am from Brazil, and I was going to buy some stuff from you in November, just the parts I cannot buy in my country for a robot I am making, then I read about free day. I even thought it was on December 7 xD.
Anyway, I bought not only the parts for the robot but also a cool lcd display and a SOLAR CELL : ), that is great, it was impossible for me to buy so much stuff from you because of customs (well I hope they charge me less than $60 this time).
As soon as I build something with it (I hope to build a solar USB charger), I will show you.
Thank you very much, and see people, they helped someone from Brazil and I won't sell the parts. Now I can build something cool.
How many companies do this sort of thing ? Give out $100K ?
It was fun. Most orders were from US i suppose?!
Me, i was watching movies during the constant retry/reload clicking !!!
Along with your server stats, can you please generate a geographical map of the locations of everybody who managed to get the freebie (no precise locations, just at North America map level)?
I'd bet its a near circular scatter graph revolving around Colorado, with maybe a few 'hits' on the east and west coasts.
I know this sounds like a bit of an attack about your servers favouring the US, but the figures dont lie, and if we see a nice random scattering of 'winners' around the world I would tip my hat in concession.
Would also be an interesting indication of how the internet realistically handles these kinds of legitimate loads (non denial of service attack traffic) targeted at one site.
How about it?
This said, I would like too to have a look to geographic distribution of winners (I am one, from Italy, me just lucky today (I am not, usually :) )).
I didn't have any scripts running, or even an incredible ping to SF. In fact, I'm about 3,000 miles away in central NY State. It's not quite Timbukthree, but it's pretty far out there. I suffered for 01:37 through the same problems before I finally made it in. I got to the various screens occasionally the whole time. And usually just timed out.
Come on, guys. You don't really understand what kind of load their new servers just underwent. Do a search for the server setups that were used for the Olympics, and that'll give you an idea of what it would take. For a company their size, they've got a pretty sweet setup. Good job, SF!
A: Run a $100K 'Free Day' on (presumably) woefully inadequate servers that drive folks to utter frustration, and result in the waste of 3 or 4 hours worth of time. Come on, guys, the Sparkfun servers were 'in the weeds' two hours before the event even began..... Put me down in the 'It was a nice thought, but the execution was miserable' camp. Totally underwhelmed by the experience! Am I the only one??
So, some folks will be angry and quite a few are already in pouting-child mode, but the rest of us will just order what we were hoping to get for free. No harm, no foul.
I enjoyed watching the twitter posts with people getting excited about getting to a shipping confirmation page.
Sparkfun gave away $100,000 worth of stuff, I think they deserve credit. Anyone with a brain knew there servers would be overloaded and not everyone would get it.
Anyway, thanks for the generous offer!
PS: I saw the pix of your "upgraded" servers and being a Net Admin for a mid-sized healthcare company (5000+ employees), your setup is a joke. You could have taken half the money you spent on those Dells and easily used Amazon to do everything for you and it would have been flawless. Leave the datacenter stuff to people who actually know what they're doing and stick to what you do best, providing wonderful customer service and creating/providing awesome electronics products.
And in case people think I'm bitter because I didn't get the free $100, I'm not, I still placed my order after the sh!tstorm for $97.84. I'm just saddened that you talked the talk of these new servers, but when it came to walking the walk you couldn't even handle the traffic the day before.
well, from my end, i was hitting F5, and [ctrl]+[r] alot...but wasent getting any server response from you guys, i wouldnt consider that servers staying up....yea, they may not have crashed, but how many users were unable to get a response??
i sat in front of my computer for about 45min doing this, until i figured the deal was over....
and for the record, i didnt just go on at 9am, i was up earlier to make my cart, and browse around
oh well...guess i'm just going to have to wait to play with an arduino... :(
No wonder there are so many unhappy people posting comments if only about 1/70 were successful.
Oh well, I'm disappointed that I wasn't one of the lucky ones. I guess I had my hopes unrealistically high. Thanks anyway.
I absolutely agree. This was the most frustrating experience. The entire time I could not even view the Sparkfun webpage as all requests would time out. I already had a cart of items I set up the night before but simply could not get on the page to purchase them. Regardless of whether or not Sparkfun servers crashed, they were definitely inadequate for the job. Had I just been too slow and missed out on the giveaway because of my own shortcomings I would have graciously accepted missing out on this event. But after the way this played out the image of Sparkfun I hold in my mind has surely been tarnished.
But when a ton of people can't even get the website to load yet it advances but $2k or more each time they see the page then something is awfully wrong.
We should all be grateful that we have Sparkfun to spark at!
I'll be back shopping tomorrow, same as always... :)
"Our servers barely stayed up!" -- sorry, no, they didn't.
Like thousands of others, I didn't get my order in - although it was fairly amusing trying to vie for that elusive $100. I captured the screen each time I got a page to load. Here are all the screen shots and a summary of my morning:
http://www.project240.net/data/sparkfun_freeday/
Thanks SparkFun.
Sorry, but your site went down faster than a whore in Vegas.
Not being able to navigate past the first page the entire time was AWESOME.
SparkFun folks, this was a good idea in principle, and I still love you guys :) My suggestion: If you do giveaways in the future, give everyone the same odds and just have a random lottery. That won't leave people with hard feelings.
oh well good on Sparkfun for trying, i managed to get as far as my cart but after an hour of server timeouts i gave up.
why are dates and times all screwed up? your post from today says Jan 4, 2010 isn't today the 7th?
This just convinced me to remove the Spark(not so)Fun bookmark and search elsewhere. I'm sure I will save more than $100 in my efforts.
Better luck next time.
By the way, it worked. I'll end up buying my cart anyway. Brilliant marketing: you paid $100k to be the #1 Google search, something that's worth far more than that.
note to sparkfun: remember "no good deed goes unpunished"
You had months to prep, and from the looks of your resources, they should have easily handled the traffic. It's also quite unusual that as soon as the promo expired, the web site was accessible.
It looks to me like you throttled down the number of active Apache child processes to slow the web server down during the promo, and I think you did so WAY BELOW the threshold of what your servers could handle.
In all likelihood, it was probably 1100 orders taken, and you have FIVE SERVERS and it took AN HOUR AND A HALF to handle 1100 orders? It just doesn't make sense.
I don't care about the free stuff, but I am perplexed. I've built systems that could handle much more with less resources, so what did you guys do?
They had supposedly "upgraded" their servers in preparation for this event. Run the stats and show us how could u possibly process less than an order a minute?
Absolutely terrible preparation but realllly nice on the publicity/marketing plot.
To quote Sparkfun -- "We're also shaving off a few features of the website (temporarily) to make everything faster, such as rating comments. After Free Day has passed we'll re-enable everything we've disabled to weather the storm."---
Look like its just as they said. They disabled the store to make ratings and comments faster and as soon as it hit the $100,000 mark, it mysteriously was at a no load state again and worked flawlessly.
I had prepared everything (I just had to reload the page and confirm) but I don't get the 100 $, although I saw and clicked 4 times the button "Submit this order to try...")
But I spend a happy day (Free day is at 5 p.m in Switzerland) full of hope.
Thanks a lot to Sparkfun for this great job
I was one of the lucky few that got the $100...and boy was I lucky. When I got to the order success page, there was 99.4k given away...
So, thanks! Great idea, and I guess we know now just how big the homebrew electronics community is.
These kinds of things really make me question the power of "free"... not that it isn't a great idea and a wonderful gift for those who get it. But the trade off for 1000 ecstatic people (Please don't gloat!) is 69,000 disappointed, bemused, frustrated, possibly bitter people. Is that really better than finding 100 school programs to give $1000 of free product to?
Check out the http headers for most pages (including static ones), the cache-control, expires are completely bogus and Last-Modified is non-existent. Product pages ARE cacheable!
As others have suggested, I think this should have been run as a "Customer Appreciation Free Day" and only limited to previous customers.
1000 successful orders in approx. 105 minutes = 9.5 orders/minute, or only one order processed every 6.3 seconds. Earlier I was guessing you'd be able to process at least an order every second. You may want to get a refund on your new servers.
Looking forward to seeing the stats.
Tom
Despite the frustration, it was fun, though. :)
I hope you got plenty of business from existing customers and not just people who read about this on the tech blogs and chose to order something pointless just to be part of a "thing". Those are the kind of folks who buy the "BoC" from Woot just to feel like they are part of something.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect you to scale your servers and connectivity to handle one-off events like this, but I do think it's advisable to take the slashdot effect into consideration in the future and have a plan. An inventation-only event for existing customers may be one thing to consider if you ever do this again.
All of the above being said, I applaud the idea. I don't feel "entitled" to something like this and so I don't bear any sour grapes for having missed out on it. I think you probably got a reasonable amount of publicity for it which may have made it all worth while.
1. "I didn't get to place my order. What a joke! We've all got it into our heads that we've a god-given right to free stuff, and SparkFun have cheated us!"
We'll just ignore this lot.
2. "I didn't get to place my order, but thanks for running this promotion anyway."
Fair play to this lot.
3. "I didn't get to place my order even with my enormously high-bandwidth internet connection!"
This is like complaining you didn't win any prizes in a raffle even when you brought a large bag to carry them home in. The speed of your internet connection doesn't matter; you'd have had as much chance on dialup. No matter how fast your internet connection is, if the backlog is such that SparkFun's servers take a few minutes to respond to every query, that's how long it'll take. This is determined by many factors, and the size of your phat pipe isn't one of them.
Not as far as I could tell. I got a couple of "request timed out" errors, but I found that if I clicked on the button to go to the next step and waited, after about five minutes it'd duly go to the next step. And for those of you using the words "crash" and "down", I'm not sure you know what they mean. If the web server had actually crashed and stopped listening for connections, I'd have got "connection refused". I didn't, although I can't speak for anyone else - maybe I was just lucky. Yes, it was very, very slow, but what do you expect when a website gives away $100,000 worth of kit?
5. "The people who got their $100 of goodies are probably just the ones who are going to flog it on eBay."
Again, I can't speak for the other thousand-odd people who got free stuff, but this certainly doesn't apply to me. I fully intend to build things with it.
This is the category I fall into, so I realise it's easy for me to take the moral high horse, if that's not mixing too many metaphors. SparkFun didn't have to give away $100k worth of kit; and when they did, it's a bit rich to complain at them at all when you're not paying them. It's not as if they've taken anything from you. You've lost nothing besides an hour or so of clicking and waiting, and nobody forced you to do that.
Anyway, rant over, as I've already invented a category 7: "My comment is so huge I had to spread it over three posts to get the comment system to accept it."
1. "I didn't get to place my order. What a joke! We've all got it into our heads that we've a god-given right to free stuff, and SparkFun have cheated us!"
We'll just ignore this lot.
I don't think anybody said or even implied anything about a "god-given right to free stuff"; that is a complete strawman.
No animosity at all from me - very happy you guys were able to do this whole thing in the first place.
However, you might want to consider an "existing customer only" event in the future.
Though, I do hope you guys got a lot of new customers in the process, to help grow your business.
I was trying since 7:55am PST, and the best I could do was get the "home page", but I just could not login to checkout.
I kept timing out...I gave up after 9am....
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Sad me.
Now for those of you sparking, It was a freeday not your crybaby day. So what it was slow/timingout/inaccessable. What did you think was going to happen?
Honestly I had no idea this site was so popular myself, but a little word to the wise for next time though.
How about have the checkout on a whole other server and connection (not a fast 1 but just 1 for temp) that way just the 1st ones to hit checkout get it and that's it.
But this is a great thing for many cause even though I was not able to participate it definitely got me looking. I have found your prices are better than others for these components and will probably be making an order some time 2day.
Regardless weather or not it was free you just made a new customer :D
Cheers!
Talk about being totally unprepared, the site was basically unavailable even the day before the give away. No one thought to maybe prepare for an increase in load? I loved how I got the message that the site was down like an hour before it started. After trying to load the page many times and getting nothing but time-out's I gave up. I guess I should have just kept trying.
Next time just do a drawing or else instead of giving away $100K, give away $80K and spend that extra $20K on a decent hosting package.
Let's have a list of the winners so we can make sure that this wasn't all just a hoax to get us to load up our carts with stuff and then once we lost decide to go ahead and purchase anyways. I mean come on, site goes down right before the contest and when its finally back up ... oh its over.
So good idea, but you were totally unprepared for this and have now left those of us who were screwed by network issues with a bad taste in our mouth.
And when one of the 70000 lost connection its place was taken by someone else. So there are much more than 70000 who didn't get through. Like playing musical chairs with 70000 chairs and 1000 comfy chairs.
I suggest that everyone consider how their comments are being received and the influence they might have on a repeat (or not) of Free Day next year. As someone else said, the notion that we are entitled to something for nothing does not bode well for our society.
Promotion worked! Looking forward to coming back for a lot more toys!
I hope you got a bunch of helpful info about your new server setup.
I am on a pretty fast internet connection at work on the East Coast. 47Mb/s!!! Just tested it again this morning. I was able to access the SF web site some of the time but I encountered the same errors of trying to check out and the web site not responding and having to reload the page and try clicking the button again. After over an hour I gave up and went to lunch (12EST) when I came back the site was working fine as Free Day was over
I did not get my order through and thats OK. But I do have some thoughts on the Free Day...
First of all, there are those out there complaining they did not get anything and they are upset... even one guy says he was hoping to get stuff on free day so he could build something, sell it, and pay the rent. I am fairly certain that free day was not designed so that SF could feed the homeless or donate to charity. They spelled out exactly what it was for.
They could have done a few things better though. Off the top of my head, maybe instead offer everyone $20 off orders of $100 or more... This encourages REAL customers to get a discount and allows more people to benefit.
As others suggested, offer this free day only to people who have accounts created prior to a specific date. It would be interesting to see how many accounts were created in the last few days. Again, I thought the idea was to reward existing customers who could not afford/wanted free stuff.
I think in general SF should have done something to make Free Day less 100% free. 50% off orders > $50, discounted items, specific bundles offered at a special price, etc etc etc. This way the people who would normally be buying from SF or who want to get started in electronics or want to get a project going can benefit and those who just want $100 of free stuff just because its free will pass on this offer.
I do believe that I had 2 things that gave me an advantage over most:
1) Patience
2) Lack of Greed
Your comment that 'your servers barely stayed up' is a little frustrating for those of us that got up early in the morning (5 a.m. New Zealand time), and never once saw the Sparkfun logo in over an hour of unsuccessful connection attempts. Yes, they may have been up, but they were down for (I bet) most of your customers! Nice idea though, next time do it on Google's or Amazon's servers, and it'll be over in five minutes! Good on you, mate!
If someone said that I could fill a wishlist with $100 worth of stuff, and there was a 1-in-100 chance I'd get it all for free, I'd be excited.
What a waste of time. I think I'll still spend the $100. I might just spend it somewhere else, though.
My guess for how long it would last was only about 10-15mins off too.
the server was dead for me i didn't made it from my cart :( (I'm from Israel)
Next time use some better servers!!
(Sorry for my English XD)
I wasted two hours of my time pounding on the F5 key while watching my frustration level climb. I got to the "payment" screen three times, but all three times it bounced me back to the previous screen.
Next time you try this kind of thing, consult with the big boys and find out how to run a real e-commerce server before you subject your customers to this mess!
Since I still can't get past the payment screen (even through the "sale" is over), I'm taking my business to Mouser. If this stunt was supposed to gain more customers for SparkFun, I think just the opposite may happen when all the ticked off people who participated in this abortion take their shopping elsewhere.
If you had a 1mb connection 3000 miles away, and someone with a t3 had a connection next door to sparkfuns' servers, both have an equal chance. It doesn't matter at what speed of a connection has. The thing is, the faster connection will get there first, but it's per packet, and there was no priority difference. You people whining need to get some networking 101 on.
It's like someone driving to a busy supermarket in the world's largest, fastest car, then expecting to be able to jump the checkout queue.
Extending the analogy, those of you pressing refresh continually are effectively getting bored partway through the queue, leaving it, and joining the back of another one.
Why not skip the drama next year and just offer a substantial discount on your site next year. Much less likely to piss off the 99% of people who have such a negative experience with your woeful infrastructure.
There were way to many people who knew about this.
Next time a lottery of random current users.
It is too bad this was a stunt gone wrong.
I can't wait to see data on server load, should be interesting.
I'm in Aus, got up at 2:45am, stayed on for an hour or so and then went back to bed unsuccessful but happy.
WHY? Because Sparkfun is still the leading light in kick-arse components, modules and really cool electronics stuff. And because they are not afraid to try radical things like free day.
Go SFE! keep innovating technically and culturally and making the world a better place in some small way!
All you whiners go and enjoy the fact that you got to participate in some fun, even if you, like me, did not get what you wanted.
No...
Did I spend a fair amount of time hitting refresh when the 'server timed out'?
Yes...
Is Sparkfun going to get my $300 order anyways?
Absolutely!!! (at least later on tonight, after all the traffic slows down a bit so I don't have to wait on the servers)
Good times guys...good times...
And to all the whiners who 'dont have enough money' or 'stayed up all night' or 'never saw the website' or whatever...
Option 1) Have a Coke and a smile and S.T.F.U.!
Option 2) Step outside and play a one-handed game of hide and go #%!#& yourself...
Great idea, poorly executed.
You'll be back....SF rocks!
I like the idea of a lottery, or maybe smaller, short-term "blue-light special" tweets (for the next 5 minutes get $50 free until we give away $10K).
This was frustrating - I heard about it a month or so ago, had everything planned out on what exactly I'd need to order, and for what? HTTP timeout errors up the wazoo. 20 minutes between page loads. And at the final "submit this order" page... nothing. Absolute nothing.
I do appreciate the promotion although I recommend SparkFun reconsider their ways of possible sponsorships in the future. I'm sure my now-scrapped project would appreciate that since I could only afford the shipping as it stood for today - and for nothing.
Thanks Sparkfun keep up the excellent work
kuddos on the new servers!
Better luck next time…. (I hope!!!!)
Hey nog meer Nederlanders hier??, toevallig nog niemand uit in de omgeving Arnhem??!! (Velp, of Hardenberg).
Rather than run hair-brained schemes such as the one today, which only seems to have pissed off around 69,000 people, why don't you just offer normal sales like most sites do?
It's not like your prices are competitive with the big guys (DigiKey, Mouser) anyway, so why risk loosing even more customers with a misguided, very poorly run stunt like the one you ran today.
Did you really think frustrating 69,000 people would generate lots of new customers and otherwise generate goodwill for your company? Quite the opposite...
The servers stopped responding way before the start and stuff left in shopping carts disappeared - imagine that! Oh well, it was an interesting cluster f*ck.
There's an easy solution to this problem: bring your service up on Amazon's EC2 utility computing service. You can scale up hundreds of servers in minutes, pay $0.10/hour/server, then when the traffic drifts away, close them back down. It doesn't help with the centralized components (like the order database), but it would have been enough to let SparkFun weather this morning's self-inflicted storm without actually buying a big server farm.
In any case, thanks to the SparkFun crew for trying such a wacky promotion.
~B)
Funny at the moment 100,000.00 was hit, everything seemed to work fine...
Congratulations on a job so well done, it would have gotten the majority of "real" people fired if this happened at their employers storefront.
anyway, thanks for trying!
Some of you people just have no f-ing class whatsoever. You're actually sitting there sparking about this whole thing being a waste of time and that SparkFun in someway wronged you just because you didn't get $100 worth of free stuff. I'd be willing to bet that every one of you worthless complainers are the first in line to get a free t-shirt or other handout. You probably also spent a few hours playing with the numbers to make sure you had exactly $100 worth of stuff and not a penny more.
You all are horrible, horrible people.
Why don't you be grateful that you were given the opportunity and then go get back in line for food stamps.
I don't think anybody said or even implied anything about a "god-given right to free stuff"; that is a complete strawman.
No, it's not - at best, it's an exaggeration. The point still stands - some posters seem to think they're entitled to something for nothing, and that they've been wronged in some way because they didn't get it.
Nobody said or implied that. That's the very definition of a strawman.
Personally, I'm bummed but it's no big deal. Nothing lost. But Sparkfun could quell a lot of anger by doing something small for everyone who couldn't get through - like a 20% discount usable anytime this week or something. Throw them a bone. I'd order my whole cart if there was a small discount. Either way I still need a few things.
This reminds me of the Walmart fiasco where people were crushed trying to get into the store for a deal.
For what it's worth, I had planned to buy a number of the items even if I missed the credit, but now the order will go elsewhere.
Perhaps you should graph the lucky 100 against the outraged.
One also wonders how many of the purchases were made by scripts.
Yes, because a webserver being really busy is *just like* a person being trampled to death.
> Perhaps you should graph the lucky 100 against the outraged.
(100000 / 100 = 1000, not 100.)
> One also wonders how many of the purchases were made by scripts.
Not mine! Am really looking forward to my first Arduino.
The sad part is that your IT people got paid for deploying that cluster-f*** and remain employed after this catastrophe.
If the give-away were on a 1st-come/1st-served basis, and everyone else beat me to the punch, then it would have been fair. But when the majority of your users can't get the site to load, spending 2 hours looking at blank pages and repeated server timeout messages, that's an entirely different issue.
I won't business with a company that incites such a situation and then has the nerve to call it a success. Thank you, SparkFun, for ensuring that I'll never at any point in the future be a customer.
You let me know.
Thanks.
$80 dinner + drinks
$60 iPod Shuffle
$450 x 2 Courtside seats to an NBA game
$40 lunch
~$40 worth of swag
$2500 WallBotz 500
Like I said earlier, I think most people aren't pissed because they didn't get $100 (or less) of free stuff, perhaps they're saddened, but not pissed. People are mostly pissed because of the experience (or lack of IT experience in this case) of the whole process. Time is money, and if I'm spending almost 2 hours of my time clicking Try Again because their pages are timing out it gets frustrating. As for me, it enrages me to see how poorly everything was setup (for the record, I've ran eCommerce datacenters and am currently a network admin for a mid-sized company with multiple datacenters) and executed. Pages should have been cached, database servers should have been a separate cluster and the order/checkout should have been on separate servers than the website/product pages.
Btw, I agree that it probably would have been better had it even been something like buy $10 and get $90 off your purchase or something. Because as someone said, you know some people got stuff just because it was free.. I guess there is still shipping so that sorta counts.. but idk..
Any thanks guys! Oh and awesome @ filling an irc room with 2336 people!
"Wow that was fast!"
No it wasn't. It was painfully slow for tens of thousands of people.
"Our servers barely stayed up!"
You clearly have a very different definition of stayed up to me! The servers became to all intents and purposes unusable three hours before the start of free day.
I think everybody always knew that this promotion was going to be a lottery with only a slim chance of winning, if we had all got a message saying 'sorry, too late' within a few minutes of trying then only the exceedingly ungrateful would be upset.
It is clear that your servers don't stand a cat in hell's chance of surviving a denial of service attack, something that you should look to rectifying as soon as possible.
Sorry to be so negative after you guys have been extraodinarily generous, but you have to admit that this event has been a victim of its own success and could have run a whole lot better.
Thanks for the generousity though.
I couple of things I noticed today.
1) There are A LOT of negative comments about SparkFun today
2) I never remember seeing any negative comments about SparkFun before today
- to be continued...
"We've beefed up our servers and completely re-written and streamlined our site. But realize that there are a lot of people with full carts waiting to hit the 'submit' button at 9AM. Servers may become slow, there may be timeouts so please be patient."
This implied that if you were there at the beginning, and were patient, most likely your order would go through. If instead, you had said "We have no idea how any of this will go, and there's a good chance many or most of you will not receive a discount. We're experimenting here, so please, don't expect too much!"
And please don't say "Our servers barely stayed up!" To most of your customers, they were effectively down. (Of course, I would have agreed with your statement if my order had gone through ;-)
4)Please, PLEASE, don't stop sharing with the community or trying new things! It's great how SparkFun is supporting the electronics community!!
Thanks SparkFun!
I would REALLY like to see regional map of where the orders came from.
Not that it really matters, im not mad about not getting anything. I just would have liked to see it done of a more fair system.
Anyways, Thanks you for the chance sparkfun, it is really nice to see a company support their customers.
422 comments? You might break the SPARC S&D comment record.
-Matthew
Again Thank You SparkFun,
Lyle
Did get to the checkout page but got lots of time-outs..
Could give the existing customers some advantage or something next time? :) I do also a lot to promote sparkfun amongst other students!
Okay, sure, Sparkfun should have realized the servers couldn't handle this. Their initial bets of 2-3 hours are laughably naive. But the things is, if they were supposed to anticipate it, why couldn't you? Why wasn't it obvious to you, the user, that the servers would crash and burn and you'd have very little chance of getting through? Even after the upgrade announcement you could easily see the site straining a good day before the start.
So yeah, time consuming gamble with no penalty for walking out. I'm not sure what you can complain about other than never being taught not to count your chickens before they're hatched. It could have been better, but this isn't worse than the offer never being made.
I'd definitely like to see them offer a lottery (even if it's for a 10% discount) to actual repeat customers someday. I'd also like to see the stats (woot provides this everyday) as far as how many "new" customers got the deal compared to people who have ordered at least once before.
Also, to put things into perspective, I have a fuller server rack IN MY HOUSE than their "upgraded server cluster" so I wouldn't exactly say they've "joined the big boys" as they like to put it. There are MUCH easier, quicker, better ways to test servers and their ability to serve concurrent requests than what they tried to do today. They really should have used AWS, it would have cost them at least 1/10th the price they paid for their current host/server upgrades. *sigh* I digress.
I bet half the stuff people scored today during this stunt will show up on eBay five minutes after UPS delivers.
"Servers may become slow, there may be timeouts so please be patient."
Also you have to love the Quote of the Day:
"Not being able to navigate past the first page the entire time was AWESOME."
I was surprised as I am in Singapore, half-way round the world. As such, the claim that only those close to the servers succeeded doesn't hold water. Some of my friends tried to the very end, and failed, or gave up and went to sleep. We all had a good laugh though.
I find it hard to understand the whining against SFE. They gave away $100k and no one forced us to sit and try for it. If we did, and failed - hey, it's the luck of the draw - someone had to fail with only 1,000 seats. Everyone put up with the same conditions, and as such it was fair. I guess in the end, the SFE community isn't as mature as I thought it would be. That immaturity, for me, was the lamest part of this whole thing.