Were your websites up all the time? Were there many frauds? What profit did we gain?
Black Friday is a very popular label, attached to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the US. There is no Thanksgiving in the Bulgarian tradition. But during the last few years the idea of big sales has become widely spread in our country. It would have been great, if we had borrowed the idea of Thanksgiving as well. You can read more about Black Friday in Wikipedia.
This year has been very successful not only for offline retailers, but also for online stores. Taking into consideration our last year’s experience, in 2016 we started preparing earlier so as to be able to provide our costumers’ online stores with all the necessary resources. I decided to write this article because our company is responsible and customer-oriented.
Today I will answer the following questions:
• What did we do?
• What happened?
• Who won?
• What was our income?
What did we do?
This year we wanted to help our customers having online stores to take the maximum of Black Friday. For a hosting company like us this meant providing them with the necessary resources. This way each visitor would have been able to buy the desired product and the website owners would not have missed any chance of sale or spent money for advertising in vain. A month ago we picked all customers who had high bandwidth on last year’s Black Friday and for that reason contacted us. We also tried to identify more of the online sellers. Currently we host more than 100.000 websites and there is a big number of online stores among them. But in order to be prepared we needed to know the approximate resource needed.
We sent emails to all the selected online sellers informing them that they should contact us if they were planning massive campaigns for Black Friday. Most of them responded. Our customers use different types of services that usually meet their daily requirements. We also asked them to try to tell us how many visitors they were expecting. If you have an online store where the number of visits doubles, this may mean increasing the page views with 10 to 20 times. Each of our customers was offered a custom solution based on the information they provided, their current usage and service. Those of them who had planned a massive campaign accepted our solution.
What happened?
Websites of customers who prepared in advance were up during the whole Black Friday. However, there were cases in which some online stores managed to generate much more bandwidth than predicted and required more resources. What did we do? We provided them with what they needed. Without requiring further payments. We had guaranteed that our customers will have the necessary resources and made sure that happened on Black Friday as well without interruptions or shutdowns.
There were also customers whose websites generated less bandwidth than expected. Some of them decided not to take advantage of our offer.
Their websites also worked properly as they were constantly being monitored by our team. We concluded that they overestimated the expected number of visitors and their current service parameters were more than enough for them.
It was our responsibility to make sure that all websites work properly.
Three of our customers that we know did not accept our offer and they had serious issues. Two of them decided to look for other alternatives and their websites experienced shutdowns. The third one thought that we had tried to cheat. On Black Friday he realized that he needed more resources and thought that we should immediately provide him with them. But sometimes transferring to another hosting service requires more processing time. And while our customer was raging in social networks against us we simply had to do our job. And we did it! But could not find time to defend ourselves on Facebook.
Who won?
The answer is clear – SuperHosting.BG’s customers did. We have always said that we work for our customers’ success. And can do it by providing them with quick performance of their websites. This means to be always up, easy to access and load fast. We can always help with the choice of the right service.
What was our income?
Our total income is BGN 6 150, VAT not included. It is definitely not possible for our income to cover our investment – from preparation to providing hardware resources in order to make sure all online stores are up on 25th November 2016. Only the human labor from all colleagues involved in this project equals more than 200 man-hours.
For Christmas holidays we will provide the same resource because Black Friday is regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S. and our customers may also like to offer more promotions. We wish them all the best and great profit!

We donated everything we had gained from our Black Friday campaign.

And hope that next year our customers will contact us by themselves so that we can ensure that they will get the most suitable hosting solution for their needs. Finally, I would like to say that planning a big advertising budget is useless if you do not also pay attention to the expected bandwidth and the necessary resources for handling it. When you inform us on time, we can also provide you with such.
Providing our customers with proper website operation, the right service and cutting edge technologies is the job we have been doing 24/7 since SuperHosting.BG was established. And we will keep on!
We would like to thank all our present and future customers that they completely trust us for the smooth operation of their websites and online stores.