Of course, my first reaction was to peruse the recipe sites on the Internet and find an appetizing concotion that didn’t appear too hard to make. I Googled the term ‘Thanksgiving Dessert Recipes’ and found this likely candidate, which I will discuss further here, from the first Google result, a site named Razzle Dazzle Recipes.

I bookmarked the link, and that evening as I was preparing for my Thanksgiving Eve trip to the grocery store I attempted to pull the page up again. I was shocked to see Razzle Dazzle Recipes was not available. My guess is that EVERYONE was looking for Thanksgiving Dessert Recipes and Razzle Dazzle exceeded their bandwidth. What a missed opportunity this is? It’s the biggest day to search for Thanksgiving related recipes, your site is at the top of the Google results and your site goes down. In fact, I’m not sure if the site was even running any advertisements prior to it’s failure – I don’t remember any (It definitely is now). I don’t know if the poor Razzle Dazzle people even made any money off their site prior to the server melting down.

Fortunately, for me, Razzle Dazzle weren’t the only ones with this particular recipe, so I was able to find it elsewhere and avert a Thanksgiving disaster.

The moral of the story is, if you operate a website, it’s always good to be prepared. Be sure you are prepared to handle, and if it’s your goal, to monetize the unexpected traffic. There is nothing worse than getting thousands or millions of hits and not being ready.