Traffic’s Up; Website’s Down, Preventing costly crashes.

Tina Henson, founder and CEO of Plastic Jungle, in Fresno, California, had high hopes for the holiday season. She had hired a public relations firm in November to promote the launch of Plastic Jungle’s redesigned website. It’s an online marketplace where visitors can buy and sell unused gift cards–or swap, say, a $25 Target (NYSE:TGT) gift card for a $25 Starbucks gift card. Although Plastic Jungle ended up getting mentioned in newspapers in several cities, Henson didn’t anticipate just how many people would be interested in trading in the gift cards they had received for Christmas. When December 26 rolled around, some 40 times the normal number of visitors flocked to PlasticJungle.com, overwhelming its Web server.

Early that morning, the site crashed, the first of several outages and slowdowns that would occur that day. Henson doesn’t know how much business she lost because of her server troubles, but she figures that about half of the more than 10,000 visitors who were dropped from the site, many of whom were in the middle of conducting a trade, never returned. “We thought we were prepared,” Henson says. “But it was the culmination of bursts, the spikes in traffic, that got us in the end.”

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