Mohamed Mansour's Personal Website

Futureshop needs to hire engineers and better management to run their website!

Posted on December 24, 2006, 9:14 pm EST

Many people know that Futureshop had a boxing sale on December 24th at 8PM. They closed the website at 3PM to get ready for the big boxing day sale on 8PM. So they "said" they will open the website at 7PM so customers could browse and add to basket.

7:00 PM

So here I am, trying to buy my mother a digital camera as a surprise for a New Year's gift. I started refreshing the page at 7PM, but they didn't open the page. So thats one lie. So I came back at 7h30PM and they still didn't open the website as promised.

8:00 PM

So I logged in at 8PM and the first thing I saw was the following.

I kept refreshing or opening new sessions, cleaned my cookies, cleaned my whole cache, and still kept on refreshing, and same issue. So at 8h07PM same error!

8:15 PM

Then finally it worked! Futureshop could be browsed again! Then here I go to add the camera to the cart! But guess what? Same error! Exact same error as the previous two.

8:30 PM

I kept trying then at 8h35PM, I received a new error!

WOW... Gateway error, not only they have lousy engineers but they have lousy hardware! Then a new error kept on flying to me! This time its an abnormal "you got kicked out" error :)

EXCELLENT security technique :) But I hoped they concentrated on the *real* security technique.

8:45 PM

Then I wanted to check again, so far I wasted over 50 minutes on the website, hoping I could get a sweet deal on this. Then a scripting error occurred.

9 PM

Finally at 9PM, they decided to say, we have no more traffic anymore!

Why?

It makes perfect sense why the site is not working. They are experiencing a high volume of customers sending requests to the server at the same time! And we are experiencing denial of service. Their main IIS servers are experiencing heavy requests, you could say it is similar to a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where many systems flood the bandwidth and the system at once.

But the question is that they knew this will happen, so they should have arranged multiple servers and new methods to provide service to all those users.

But the really messed up thing is that they are recognized by Microsoft! This link http://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies/futureshop.mspx , states that Futureshop is running good and healthy with their products. I believe Microsoft should pay a little more attention to Futureshop, cause I think Futureshop has some problems.

I am not attacking Microsoft, I personally think they are a great company, their websites are running on IIS, and they are #1 most visited website in the world, so their IIS server is not a problem, nor their scripting language. The problem relies on how Futureshop engineers and management are ran. They had to have future plans on this matter. They should of acted upon it. For god's sake, use more than one server :( This website on a shared hosting could handle more requests then Futureshop :)

• REMEMBER