Just watched my client's website crash during their biggest sale of the year

I'm a freelance web guy and last Thursday my client in Austin had their Black Friday in July sale go live. Their site was doing fine for like 20 minutes and then it just died. Turns out they spent all their budget on fancy graphics and zero on server capacity. I had to scramble and spin up a bigger server through my own hosting account at 2 AM just to get them back online. Lost about $2,300 in sales during that downtime. The client was freaking out but I told them we need to plan for traffic spikes instead of hoping for the best. Now I'm trying to figure out if there's a good way to stress test a site before a big launch without paying a ton for those load testing tools. Has anyone else had a client who refused to prep for heavy traffic and then blamed you when things went south?

2 comments

2 Comments

lopez.simon2d ago

Especially with e-commerce it's almost like people think buying a fancy car means you don't need to check the oil, and @josephbutler is spot on about that site bloat being the real killer half the time. Have you tried running Lighthouse in Chrome just to see what's bogging things down before you pay for any big tools?

josephbutler2d ago

Man, that's rough. But here's something nobody's talking about - sometimes the problem isn't just the server capacity, it's how the site is built in the first place. I had a similar situation last year, client went all in on slick animations and heavy video backgrounds, and that stuff eats resources like crazy. You can have the biggest server in the world but if your code is bloated with a bunch of unnecessary junk it's still gonna crawl during a spike. Maybe look into something like k6 or even just Apache's built-in benchmarking tool, they're free and decent enough for basic stress testing before you go spending money. Also worth thinking about a CDN, that took a lot of pressure off my client's site when we finally got them on Cloudflare. But honestly, some clients just don't get it until it happens to them, and then they act surprised.