Vodacom has launched Vodacom Fame (http://www.vodacomfame.co.za/). It’s all a promotion combined with a competition to get people and celebrities to make a video resembling the Single Ladies spoof that is airing at the moment. It’s a ripoff of the Beyonce Knowles music video. I like the video, and the promotion is a good idea.
The problem is that the website is broken. Going to http://www.vodacomfame.co.za/zoopy or any derivative thereof brings up:
A timeout occured while waiting for the script output (in: /usr/www/users/vodacoa/index.php).
Why the fail? My money is on the fact that the website interfaces with Zoopy which is an only video sharing services, and the interfacing is either broken or cannot handle the traffic that the website is generating. User registration, login, etc. doesn’t work currently.
So if you’re like me and would really like to see these videos, give http://vodacomfame.co.za/ a skip and go direct to http://www.zoopy.com/ and search for “single ladies”.
Next time you want a run a good marketing campaign (and I do believe this is a brilliant one) consider that it will actually work and you’ll need stable software.
Hi Chris,
I would just like to clarify that the timeout issue experienced yesterday was due to the limitations of the shared hosting environment in which the site is sitting. The site is being moved to a dedicated environment (as we speak) but this is going to take a couple of days to complete. In the interim our hosting partner has agreed to raise the default limits of the shared hosting environment to cope with the extra load. The Zoopy infrastructure is run off 5 dedicated machines (to my knowledge) and the fault does not lie on their side.
Hi Brett,
Yip, I was pretty sure that it was not on Zoopy’s side, seeing they’re an established website for quite some time. My point is just that they should’ve catered for enough web hosting resources if they knew they were going to promote a website and potentially get thousands of people flocking to it. Why go through all the effort to promote it if a large percentage of people visiting it couldn’t get in?