2006 Valentine's Day Report Highlights

• February 14, 2006 Hallmark.com website experiences downtime again: During the last day of the performance monitoring, more people chose Hallmark.com for their last minute post cards than the website was able to support. First, the website response time exceed considerably the daily averages. Then, the website stopped accepting visitors and processing orders. It was obvious that the IT people at Hallmark.com were prepared for that situation: Online Customers were kindly informed that due to the extremely high volume of web-visitors, the website was not accepting orders temporarily but they were invited to return to the Hallmark website later. WebSitePulse experts believe that the problem was not resulting from insufficient bandwidth capacity, but rather from the limited capability of the back-end hardware and web applications to process the higher volume of orders. One of the reasons for this conclusion was the extensively large in size floral background of the message
• February 13, 2006 FTD.com and Hallmark.com could not handle the increased traffic to their websites: With the approach of the 14th, web traffic to FTD.com and Hallmark.com intensified starting Monday morning. The monitored transactions response times increased dramatically, reaching above-average levels. In some instances, Hallmark.com website even timed out, and for a short period of time around noon, the home page responded with "page not found" error message. Perhaps during that time, Hallmark.com IT support professionals were working to resolve the timeout issues, because in the afternoon the website was performing at- or slightly above its typical web transaction response time levels.