By Dave Zatz
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
These guys are pathetic! We want to give eBags money this weekend and they’re not prepared to take it. eBags states they’ll be back “on line in a couple of hours” — well, we’re way past the 24 hour mark at this point.
Obviously eBags is taking ecommerce lessons from The Gap, who also likes to bring their business down for updates. So we’ll take this opportunity to reiterate some web basics, free of charge…
Rule one in the world of online: you do not go dark ever. As in never. As in only if you have an earthquake or a power outage or your server cluster blows, and even then, you better have figured out backs-ups and redundancies and co-locations and so on.
Not every single outage can possibly be prevented – I know, I’ve been engineering systems and networks for 20 years. Even if it can be prevented, if the business is willing to take a hit to sales, that’s their perogative. Brick and mortar businesses close their doors every night and still manage. It can be the same with a web business – just bacause your business is on the web does not mean you can never go offline.
Your headline makes the ordinary seems scandalous…kinda’ like Star magazine for techies. Rather ridiculous…
You should find something more interesting to write about, like realtechnews.com not getting more than about 10 hits a day. I just happened to hit your site because I was searching for eBags info.
I don’t know… perhaps ‘making upgrades’ is a better way of saying they have some catastrophic problem to deal with.
They’re back online as of now, in case anyone’s still wondering. Everything seems to be as it was before the outage, excuse me, “upgrade”…
http://www.woot.com sells out after a few hours and stops selling once or twice a week. That has not hurt their business
A lot of e-commerace sites go down for a few hours, ebay, compusa, circuit city, best buy, to name a few. Now going down for a day or two when you say you will be down for a couple of hours could possibly harm you in the short.
I think the person who posted this is pathetic. They must of needed to do some last minute shopping and blame the site for their problems! Yeah websites go down..get over it. Is the world going to end?