CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

Sorry about the website slowness and sporadic down-time this morning. For some reason, Friday likes to give us the most fits. Almost every time we run into any issues it happens on a Friday. Go figure…

Anyhow… In case other web developers run into this issue, here is what happened, and what we did to fix it.

This morning we noticed that w3wp.exe on our web server was using nearly 100% of the CPU and was floating between 3GB and 6GB of memory usage.

Restarting IIS didn’t solve the problem. w3wp.exe would quickly consume all available resources.

Solution: Re-deploy the ASP.Net 2.0 website.

My theory is that the ASP.Net compile state somehow got corrupted. Re-deploying the website simply triggered a full recompile.

The website is back up and running smoothly now.

We finally tracked down the issue. The web server had a setting from a previous configuration that was no longer valid, and this was causing the web server to periodically send web requests off to never-never-land.

This has been cleaned up, and the server has had no down time since the issue was resolved on Monday evening.

On Tuesday we took the site down for about 30 mintues to install a new firewall. Since then we have had a couple mornings where people have had trouble hitting the website. I appologize for the inconvenience. The site should be back up and fully functional right now, and we are trying to identify the issue. Until then, feel free to send mail to staff@checkoutmycards.com or call 1-800-517-3540 if you encounter any issues connecting to the site.

Email Backlog
I am still way behind on email. I went through several thousand messages this weekend and flagged ones that need a response. I will try to send responses this week. If you are still waiting on a response from us by next weekend, please send us another message.

Incorrectly Identified Cards
I finally got a chance to go through all of the notifications we got over the last month, and I updated all of the cards that had been incorrectly identified. If you still see some cards that you think are wrong, please click the notification hyperlinks.

Hiring Status
Now that we have more space, we have been busy hiring more people and training them in. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will find some time to update the site with profiles of our new employees.

Network Issues
If you tried to visit the site on Friday morning, you may have had trouble getting in. This was due to some faulty network equipment. I love the response we got from one of our Canadian users when the site was back up.

Whew…I was missing my fix of “COMC”. Glad to see things are all good again. I’m spreading the word about the site and hope to send more cards soon.
HabsFan24

This week we will be installing some new network hardware that should help us better manage these issues. We may have to take the site down for about 30 minutes to install the hardware. That will happen either Tuesday morning or late some evening this week.

After two weeks, we are finally settled in enough at our new location for you to start sending us your cards again. Thank you for your patience. The new address has been posted on the site. We are still in Redmond, but now we are in a facility that has room for us to grow much more rapidly.

Once we receive your cards, you will be given a estimate for when we will be done processing your cards. We will give priority to first time sellers and to shipments that are 200 or fewer cards. After that it is pretty much first come, first serve.

Due to the overwhelming demand for our consignment service, we are no longer offering volume discounts. Also, we have slightly adjusted our processing fees. There is now an additional $2 fee per shipment. This makes the shipping fees paid by the buyer and the processing fees paid by the seller the same. That is $2 + $0.20 per card.

You guys have been sending so much traffic to the CheckOutMyCards.com that we ran out of disk space on the drive that stores the web logs. This caused a short period of down time this evening.

Normally I pay more attention to the servers, but with all of the stuff going on with the move, I haven’t had the opportunity.

Quick Status Update
The site is working great now. We will have all the orders shipped tomorrow. We are picking up office furniture and setting up more computers on Tuesday, and by Wednesday we should have all stages of our processing pipeline unblocked. If all goes well, there should be many thousands of new cards on the site this weekend.

No April fool’s joke today. We are very excited to make this announcement. It is a great thing for everyone following CheckOutMyCards.com.

The excitement and demand for our consignment service has blown us away. In order to provide the best and most timely service, we need a new location where we can hire several more people. We have decided to move to a much larger facility that will allow us plenty of room to grow. We will be staying in the Seattle area and have started lease negotiations. We hope to move in the next few weeks.

If you are looking to sell cards…
This is really good news because we will soon have the team and the location that can support your demand. While we are in transition, please wait to send more cards until we update the site with further instructions. This will likely be somewhere towards the end of April or early part of May.

If you are looking to buy cards…
This is awesome news because our selection will grow much more rapidly. All of the competition will also help ensure that you continue to get fair prices. During the move we anticipate very minimal disruption to our shipping schedule. All orders should still be shipped within two business days.

If you are looking to join an exciting new startup…
You are in luck! We need honest, dependable, careful people that can help us with many different aspects of our system. We are particularly interested in those of you that can help identify all of the cards that people are sending in. Formal job postings will be added to the site in the next few weeks. If you want to be ahead of the game, feel free to send your resume and desired pay range to recruiting@checkoutmycards.com

This is our first newsletter from CheckOutMyCards.com.  The last few months have been extremely busy as we have started to roll out many new services. 

Interested in buying sports cards?
Our inventory is constantly growing as people continue to send us their cards.  We recently passed 50,000 different cards on the site, and we will be adding 2,000 – 10,000 cards per week.  So, you will want to check back frequently to see what has been added.

Make an Offer!
Last week we released the ability to make an offer.  It is very easy to add several cards to an offer and send that offer to a seller.

Interested in selling your sports cards?
It is now easier than ever.  We have simplified the fees and commission structure.  It is simply $0.20 per card.  You send us your cards, and we do all the work.  That is an unbelievable deal for full-service consignment.  This is only possible because of our patent-pending technology.

Also, we have listened to your feedback and decided to simplify our commission structure.  Commission is now only a flat 20%, and you can completely avoid paying any commission by using your earned store credit to buy other cards on the site.

Learn more about selling cards on CheckOutMyCards.com

What happened to LowPriceCards.com?
LowPriceCards.com has been retired and replaced with CheckOutMyCards.com.  This change was made so the tools we build and use to collect and sell sports cards online can be available to all collectors.

Everything that you have loved about LowPriceCards.com is now available to help YOU sell cards on CheckOutMyCards.com.

We hope you enjoy our services as we continue to work towards building the best experience for buying and selling sports cards.

Please continue to spread the word about CheckOutMyCards.com, the safe & easy way to buy & sell sports cards!

Julia Getsch
Business Manager
http://www.checkoutmycards.com

We finished migrating everything to the new servers, but we aren’t done performing some additional database optimizations. Therefore, the site performance hasn’t yet reached its full potential, but it is better than it used to be.

Enjoy the pics of our new servers. Hopefully my software designing skills are better than my picture taking ones.