Website Down! Is it Funny when a Funny site gets hit with Downtime?

How Funny is it when a Funny site gets hit in the face with Downtime?

Turns out, not that funny.

MSN.com home page posted a photo highlighting a hilarious website https://awkwardfamilyphotos.com today. The website allows users to post awkward family photos – imagine if you will such photo categories as “The Mullet Club,” “Dad’s without Shirts” etc…

Awkward Family Photos Website Down
Awkward Family Photos Website Down

The owners of the website also just published a book of photos along the same vein. The article accompanying the photo included a link to the awkwardfamilyphotos.com however, as might be expected with this type of publicity the website crashed the day of the MSN.com article.

Clearly, in the short-term, the awkwardfamilyphotos.com website owners will pay a lost opportunity cost for not being prepared for the influx of hits. In their defense, perhaps they didn’t know the timing of the article and therefore didn’t have a chance to prepare with added capacity or web load stress testing. This may have also been a case where active User Traffic Pattern monitoring, which includes monitoring and alerting on the number of webpage hits and average page load time may have helped the website users get ahead of the capacity curve early in the ramp up of site visits.

Again, at this point what we don’t know is the potential long-term impact (ie. Google Site Speed cost) of a sudden, but relatively sustained loss in site speed.

What we do know is that a funny site got smacked with website down-time and slow load times – we ran a couple instant tests on our free website uptime tool (see one typical result below) – and we doubt the owners of the site are laughing.

 

 Monitoring Location

Monitoring Date and Time

Duration(msec)

Status

Error Description

Error Number

Reason

MN, USA 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 1750 S   0 Ok
NY, USA 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 266 F HTTP Error 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
London, UK 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 2141 S   0 Ok
CA, USA 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 312 S   0 Ok
FL, USA 5/20/2010 10:20:55 AM 3734 S   0 Ok
Hong Kong, China 5/20/2010 10:21:01 AM 750 F HTTP Error 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Calgary, Canada 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 2016 S   0 Ok
Frankfurt, Germany 5/20/2010 10:20:55 AM 1438 S   0 Ok
CO, USA 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 469 S   0 Ok
Sydney, AU 5/20/2010 10:20:55 AM 2016 S   0 Ok
TX, USA 5/20/2010 10:20:54 AM 1766 S   0 Ok
Amsterdam, Netherlands 5/20/2010 10:20:55 AM 2250 S   0 Ok
Tel-Aviv, Israel 5/20/2010 8:20:55 AM 1750 S   0 Ok

How Funny is it when a Funny site gets hit in the face with Downtime? … Turns out, not that funny. Awkward Family Photos website down on MSN feature. Run Dotcom-Monitor’s Free Website Uptime Tool here.

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