When Woot Went Down, Woot Tracker Stayed Up

Woot-Tracker.com was a real-time deal tracking service that solved one of the early web’s most frustrating problems: what happens when a popular site can’t handle its own traffic?

A historical project from the early 2000s, before AWS existed and Amazon acquired Woot.

The Glory Days of Woot

For those who remember, Woot.com was the daily deal site before daily deal sites were everywhere. One product, one day, one price—until it sold out. Simple concept, massive following.

But then came the Woot Offs.

During these special events, Woot would cycle through multiple deals throughout the day. Bargain hunters would obsessively refresh the site, hoping to catch the next great deal. The problem? Woot’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the traffic.

The Problem: When Deals Meet Reality

Woot Offs were a perfect storm of technical failure:

• Site crashes during peak traffic when deals went live
• Slow page loads that timed out before you could see the deal
• Lost opportunities as deals sold out while the site was down
• Frustrated users hitting refresh hundreds of times
• No mobile experience (this was 2000s web, remember)

You’d sit there refreshing a broken page while knowing that somewhere, a great deal was happening that you couldn’t see. The irony was painful—Woot’s success was killing Woot.

The Solution: Build a Better Woot Than Woot

Woot Tracker became the solution the community needed:

✅ Always Available - Stayed online when Woot.com crashed
✅ Real-Time Tracking - Monitored deals even when the main site was down
✅ Deal History - Kept track of what had been offered and when
✅ Faster Loading - Lightweight interface that actually worked
✅ Community Hub - Where deal hunters gathered during outages

When Woot went down during a Woot Off, thousands of users would flock to Woot Tracker to see what they were missing.

Technical Architecture (2000s Style)

Built with the tools of the era, optimized for reliability over elegance:

Backend

• Perl scripts for web scraping and data processing
• XML data storage for deal information and history
• Custom caching layer to serve content when Woot was unreachable
• Scheduled monitoring to detect new deals and site status

Frontend

• Lightweight HTML/CSS that loaded fast, even on dial-up connections
• Zero JavaScript - 100% Web/1.0
• Mobile-friendly (before responsive design was a thing)

Infrastructure

• Single VPS with 64MB RAM running nginx/lighttpd (because that’s what you could afford)
• Manual deployments with ssh and vim
• Database-free architecture using flat files and XML

The Impact

At its peak, Woot Tracker served:

• 10,000+ daily active users and 10m+ requests per hour during major Woot Offs
• Real-time updates for deal hunters across the country
• Historical deal data that Woot itself didn’t easily provide
• Bag of Crap Alerts that would sound off if there was a bag of crap
• Significant Google AdSense revenue from high-volume traffic and engaged users

The site became an unofficial lifeline for the Woot community, especially during the frequent outages that plagued major sales events. The combination of passionate users obsessively refreshing for deals and Google AdSense in its early, high-paying days made Woot Tracker surprisingly lucrative for a side project.

Lessons Learned (The Hard Way)

Building Woot Tracker taught me fundamental lessons about web development:

Reliability Matters More Than Features

• Users don’t care how fancy your site is if it doesn’t work when they need it
• Simple, robust solutions often beat complex, fragile ones

Know Your Traffic Patterns

• Plan for traffic spikes, not average load
• Cache everything you can, especially when upstream dependencies are unreliable

Community Builds Around Problems

• People will find ways to solve problems that companies won’t or can’t solve
• Sometimes the best solution comes from outside the official ecosystem

Technical Constraints Force Creativity

• Limited hosting and no cloud infrastructure meant every optimization mattered
• Working within constraints often leads to better, more focused solutions

Historical Context

This was the early 2000s web:

• No AWS - Cloud computing didn’t exist; you bought servers or used shared hosting
• No CDNs for regular folks - Content delivery was a luxury for big companies
• Limited bandwidth - Optimizing for dial-up connections was still necessary
• Pre-social media - Communities formed around websites and forums
• Before Amazon - Woot was independent and scrappy, not a subsidiary of a tech giant

Woot Tracker existed in the brief window when small, independent sites could build significant communities around solving real problems that bigger companies couldn’t or wouldn’t address.

The End of an Era

The site eventually became obsolete as:

• Woot improved their infrastructure (somewhat)
• Amazon acquired Woot in 2010, bringing enterprise-level reliability
• Daily deal sites proliferated, reducing Woot’s uniqueness
• Cloud infrastructure made building reliable sites much easier

But for a few years in the early 2000s, Woot Tracker filled a real need for a passionate community of deal hunters.

Why This Project Mattered

Woot Tracker was my first taste of building something that people actually used and depended on. It taught me that the best projects often come from solving your own problems—I was a frustrated Woot user who got tired of broken pages during Woot Offs.

Sometimes the most valuable software isn’t the most technically impressive; it’s the software that works when everything else doesn’t.