On the 27th of May we’ll be running a little members only promotion. We’ll be selling a lot of stuff that people love and want, at prices they could only dream about.

• This is a members only special event. Not a member? Click here to register. Its important to register in advance, as registration will be closing at 11am on the day, one hour before the event goes live.
• Its all happening to get people talking about CatchOfTheDay
• Quantities are very limited, and listed below
• We can’t predict how big the response will be, have mercy on our servers

We definitely fell on point 2 there by talking about it on this blog and this post on OzBargain. Although many still felt hurt from last year’s birthday bash fiasco (more details on the OzBargain wiki), it certainly did not stop them trying to run it again this year.

Well. At least they are trying to be honest this time and admit that there’s still possibily that their web servers cannot cope with load. They have also clearly listed out the quantity this time to avoid speculations like last time on exactly how many Nintendo Wii’s they have in their warehouse.

I had a quick glance on the items listed and unfortunately nothing interests me this time so I won’t queue up with you guys :)

Update: Just had a look at Rackspace’s managed configuration (I believe CoTD uses Rackspace for hosting), and the “cheapest” server has a quad core AMD, 2GB memory and runs RedHat Linux — at the price that’s around 10x our monthly hosting cost here at OzBargain (i.e. expensive).

Here are some simple suggestions for handing traffic surge (might not be possible as Rackspace is managing the system):

• Replace Apache/mod_php with Nginx/PHP-FastCGI (running 2 Nginx worker + ~10 PHP slaves) and enable xcache for op-code and variable caching.
• Replace your front page with a static HTML file which Nginx will serve in no time. Just re-generate it every few minutes for updates.
• Cache all the pages in xcache (using variable cache), and serve them to guests/visitors.

Even a quad core AMD Opteron will go a long way :)

• Nintendo Wii for $199.
• Sony Playstation 2 for $99
• Micro RC Helicopter for $5
• Samsung 8MP Camera for $49
• Tom Tom GPS for $99
• Samsung DVD Player for $29
• Kenwood Steam Mop for $29
• iPod Nano 4GB for $99
• … and much more

Check out their blog for details. With sweet deals like these, no wonder their dedicated server cannot cope with the surge of traffic.

Not that they have overloaded their warehouse with goodies. They have also overloaded their servers! Well, I am not going to talk about handling scalability problem over here but maybe both CotD and JetStar need to sign up classes on the new cloud computing.

Under the category Best site for freebies and vouchers listed a site that I had a quick review back in April — Bargain Sniper. Now, why is this site the best for freebies and vouchers is beyond me. Or maybe those in ACA/NineMSN can enlighten me about who can get to be featured — because I don’t mind the traffic it brings!

At around 7pm AEST my server, which usually pushes out traffic at around 300kbps at that time of the day, gets a traffic spike at as much as 2Mbps! It turns out that Bargain Sniper’s hosting company, Jumba, suspended their hosting account (due to traffic spike I presume). As my review page came out as #2 on Google’s search result page on “bargain snipper”, everyone came to this blog instead! Over the 2 hour span I am getting around 4,000-5,000 page views at this blog, which is around 20 times what it would normally get.

So here is my congratulation to the Bargain Sniper guys for making onto the national television. It would be interesting to see what do they have in store when the door re-opens tomorrow.

Around the middle of every month for 24 hours only we offer up hundreds of past popular catch’s on our sister site www.dailydeals.com.au. The actual day is advertised on the site a few days before launch.

“Middle of the Month” means –

Well. You can now pretty much figuring out when Catchathon #9 is coming out. Regularity is a good thing.

It will kick start in 45 minutes. I will update this entry with some interesting items in this month’s Catchathon. (Note: Don’t forget that our weekly OzBargain competition ends in 45 minutes as well!)

Update 12:17pm: Not good. Currently I am getting:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /home/admin/public_html/includes/functions/database.php on line 19
Unable to connect to database server!

Looks like they are having a very popular start!

And the website speed pretty much proves how big this Catch A Thon is. It is only 15 minutes pass twelve, and Daily Deals’ website is already crawling. While I was going to write something about some personal picks but I guess I simply can’t this time as one whole page took more than 3 minutes to load.

Fortunately we have got QQQ from Catch of the Day doing a “CotD TV” showing some of the highlights at this month’s Catch A Thon.

Btw, it is nice to match names with faces — I have been “talking” to a lot of merchants and web site owners since running this blog but it is nice to actually see some name you know actually talking on a video. However, a video-cast from oz bargain blog? Hmmm. Maybe not :)

Catch A Thon will kick start at 12pm today, but too bad I am having a meeting then. Hopefully there will still be something left after I come back.

Some of my predictions:

• Lots of USB-powered devices, as hinted on CotD site.
• Return of many good deals, at CotD price, i.e. cheap.
• It will run for more than 24 hours due to demand, just like previous Catch-A-Thons.

Hey guys. Just make sure you don’t crash their server at non today.

Spec looks pretty impressive, especially the contrast, which has always been LCD’s weakness against plasma.

• Contrast: 1600:1
• Brightness: 500 cd/m2
• Resolution: 1366×768
• HDMI input.

I looked at some budget brand 37″ LCD 10 months ago, and the price was all around $2,000 from either Aldi or Deals Direct. Well, CotD is now selling the same size for $1,099, but it is today only (ends midday tomorrow 18/03/2007). However with how quick the price drops, we’ll see them selling under $1,000 in Kmart and BigW in a few months time…