The Roller Coaster is broken…

So, the 15th of Feb. has come. it’s 08:59 Israel time, and i am logging into the Ardbeg site. the countdown is almost finished, 9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1..0 and?!

Nothing! the countdown is broken. Someone has not thought about other time zones other than GMT that would log in? A twitter friend from SA asked me about this as well. I thought to myself, minor glitch. let’s wait until 11 am my time and log into the store, that will surely work.

Five minutes to 11:00, i try browsing the Ardbeg site. Guess what? yup. the site is down. nothing shows up, no progress, no 404 nothing. dead. caput. So many people are trying to log in i think to myself?

Now, Ardbeg has created an amazing buzz around their new release : Press, Bloggers , mail to the committee members etc. It was no surprise that people are going to be very interested in putting a hand on a bottle. right?

I am a software engineer. i work by certain standards, when a system is defined, the load and redundancy are a crucial step in the design. I am very surprised Ardbeg (or rather their IT guys) have not thought about:

• Capacity planning
• Load Balancing
• Redundancy
• QOS

4 vital aspects of every web site, especially for a commercial site launching a campaign.

A fellow blogger and twitter friend (@olikli) has posted a good post about this embarrassing situation here. Read his notes. i agree with every word.

Ardbeg, Get off the Rollercoaster and start planning ahead so your dear committee members get the service and attention they deserve. If you can’t deliver, do not promise.

Update: (16-2-2010 12:10 GMT +2)

After more than 24 hours since my initial try (and after the Ardbeg site was down / non-functional / sluggish as hell ) i was able to finally place an order for the Coaster… The process took my over 10 minutes, as each page loaded extremely SLOW , which was very frustrating.

BTW:

Point #1 : In an apologetic email sent by Ardbeg, they promised to update all Committee members when their site is up and running. I have not received any update email until this moment.

Point #2:  As suggested by Ruben from Whiskynotes.be , Ardbeg should have closed the shop completely until it was perfectly operable.

I do hope that the next committe  release is going to be a smoother one, now that Ardbeg have learned their lesson the hard way.

I am all hopes that the Roller will be to my liking, after all the time wasted and frustration I’ve suffered trying to get hold of this "miracle" bottling 🙂

Slainte!

Update #2 : (April 25th 2010)

I finally received my RC after 2 whole months of Via Dolorosa. Israeli Customs suck. At one time i thought it was lost in transition, but with the whisky god’s help, it arrived!

Post and review, soon!