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BigCommerce Saves the Day

Based on the number of visits we saw from the review of GoDaddy’s hosting service, quite a few of you found my last article interesting. In case you haven’t read it, look for the tags ‘horrible, awful, disastrous, putrid, disgusting, nasty, slow, nightmare’ and you’ll be sure to find it.

We had a client who received major press attention late last week on the Ellen Degeneres show (TheHappyMovie.com). Prior to the show airing, the informational WordPress site had been migrated to a dedicated server with a nice set of specs that an ‘expert’ at GoDaddy had assured the client would be enough to handle significant sustained volumes of traffic. Of course when the time came, we saw the server repeatedly crash with only 200 or so active visitors at a given time (not a lot by web standards). Our team spent the better part of the day trying to resurrect it and monitoring it in case it was down or having trouble again. We’d optimized the machine to death in hopes of avoiding the issue, but it didn’t matter.

As the situation worsened, we realized that GoDaddy support and their hardware weren’t going to be of any use so we started pushing traffic to the client’s web store (features from and hosted by BigCommerce). Using social channels and other avenues we tried to get the word out that the main site was struggling and that it was a better option to visit the store directly, rather than going to GD’s informational areas.

A few great things were highlighted as differences between GoDaddy and BigCommerce.

BigCommerce (played by the lone ranger) saves the day

1. Service, service, service. I had support from the BigCommerce team all the way through. Rather than getting a shoulder shrug (‘We’re not sure what’s going on but it looks like a latency issue’) like we did from GoDaddy, we had people on hand willing to help monitor the site / store performance. I even had contact with tech support and customer service on Saturday directly (not through some silly ticketing system). The difference this made to both the client and our team was enormous. Quick responses, around the clock, and an attitude of ‘you’re our client so we’ll take care of you’ that is absent with so many companies today.

2. Performance. The BigCommerce hosting plan more than beat expectations. If the service alone wasn’t worth the monthly charge (seriously, I’d pay $25 just to spend a little quality time with their tech / support team), I have the benefit of the hosting plan & server performance (not to mention the actual ecommerce software itself). With over 40,000 sustained visits I can’t count the # of times that Go Daddy crashed. BigCommerce? Not once. Zip, zero, zilch. I don’t think I even noticed a slow down when the show was airing in big markets.

All in, BigCommerce was a very bright light in a very stressful and disappointing situation (thanks to GoDaddy). Kudos to the team there. Definitely made me feel great about our continued partnership. If you want to take the time for a free trial, visit BigCommerce today.

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