Xmas Senders Drop Links, Bump Delivery

Think you have network problems? Try the greeting card biz… especially if you’re a small producer.

British artist Jacquie Lawson sent her first animated Christmas e-card to several friends in 2000, and quickly found herself in the e-greeting business. Jacquie’s combination of animation, music, interactivity and her dog Chudleigh is magic. So magic, in fact, that the response puts her servers through the wringer at the holidays.

Mike Hughes-Chamberlain is chief cook-and-bottle washer for www.jacquielawson.com. He programs the Microsoft IIS 5.0 website and manages his Windows 2000 servers while juggling all other things technical.

Still from a Jackquie Lawson Christmas card
Mike read our Oughta Be Patented Idea for Improving E-Card Deliverability Through Corporate Filters. Here’s how it works: Give e-card senders the option to send plain text messages with no attachments and no embedded links. Just the greeting card site’s address (non-clickable), with an access code for the individual’s personal card. Another British greeting card outfit, ecards, liked our idea so well, they quickly upgraded their PHP scripts to allow e-mailing of plain text messages, with web service by Apache 1.3.33 on Red Hat Linux.

Mike plans to implement our method, too… right after Christmas. Mike has a darned good reason for waiting:

You’re quite right that a lot of corporate mailservers have more restrictive policies, and we do see a higher percentage of our mail being blocked by corporate domains than by ISPs. But as often as not they’ll block anything that looks like an e-card anyway, on the grounds that it’s personal as opposed to business correspondence!

Having said that, offering the option of plain text format would be an obvious enhancement … It would also be technically easy to achieve, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t add such a facility to both our e-card websites (www.jacquielawson.com and www.charlieturner.com). I’ll add it to the list of things to do once the Christmas rush is out of the way!

The scalability of a website like this is quite considerable: the ratio of sustained traffic from (say) mid-August to mid-December is not far off 100 to 1: the ratio of peaks is probably a lot greater. That means that if in August there’s a CPU which is running at 1%, we need to be worried that in mid-December it will be flatlining! And the same goes for bandwidth, database usage, physical disk queues … not to mention things outside our control such as credit card payment processors, Akamai content delivery (thank God for Akamai!), and so on.

Every year we aim to have in place at least double the resources we will require. So far that policy has stood us in good stead, and we’ve never had to close down the site (whereas we’ve often been delighted to see American Greetings putting up a “sorry we’re too busy” sign!!!). But every year Jacquie comes up with something new and we never know just how much new traffic that will generate. And we have to have the rock-solid infrastructure, tried and tested over the quieter months, to cope with whatever people chuck at it.

Peaks & Valleys Slam All Greeting Servers

It’s a question of people getting their Christmas cards out on time. We have a lot of loyalty to our members - which is generally reciprocated! - and we really do try to give them something special each Christmas to send to their friends and family. And we also really try to make sure that every damn card is delivered on time!

So: we don’t do software changes 15 days before Christmas!

But also: yes, you are right that plain text notifications would be a very good option to have, and we will do it early in 2006. Promise.

How can you argue with that?

By the way, when we told you Mike handles all other things technical, we weren’t kidding. Mike studied music at Oxford University. When he’s not juggling servers, he’s writing the music for Jacquie’s e-cards. Our kind of network manager.

Enrichment: Wondering what the big guys use to pump out happiness? Netcraft reports that American Greetings and BlueMountain are riding Apache 1.3.27 on Red Hat Linux with Python 2.3.3, while Hallmark’s running Apache 2.0.46 on Red Hat Linux. Think they’re onto something?