All publisher problemsBuild my stack
It falls over under load
How do we avoid a platform that buckles on a big news day?
The short answer
Performance complaints cluster around traffic spikes, not steady state. Ask for evidence from publishers your size at your peak, not a comfortable monthly average.
Publishers have raised this 1,539 times across the mentions we analyse, naming 325 specific tools.
Find tools built for peak load
We'll weight reliability and evidence from publishers your size at your peak.
What publishers reported
The tools this comes up about most, and what was actually said. Counted from public publisher mentions rather than our own verdict, and each quote is attributed to the tool it was about.
Rakuten29 mentions
“It can be slow at times. It can take me a while to get done what I need to do.”
Worldpay29 mentions
“Shopper IP is used by Worldpay for risk scoring and fraud rules, so the omission silently degrades risk decisioning on wallet transactions.”
PublishPress26 mentions
“Immediately after migrating, the entire back-office became unreachable; only the Dashboard responded.”
Braintree23 mentions
“Braintree Apple Pay throws NoSuchEntityException for empty guest cart in non-English locales”
Hunch23 mentions
“installClaudeHooks deletes user hooks from .claude/settings.json (mixed entries and foreign dist/cli/index.js hooks)”
OpenAI Ads22 mentions
“SEO authority health: 292/304 checks passed. 12 SEO authority invariant(s) failed.”
OpenAI Instant Checkout22 mentions
“The model could misinterpret a request and order the wrong item, wrong quantity, or from the wrong seller.”
Criteo21 mentions
“Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) : error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure”
Klaviyo19 mentions
“Klaviyo abandoned-cart suppression ("Placed Order zero times") does not kick in, so the customer can receive an abandoned-cart flow for an order they completed.”
Amazon KDP19 mentions
“a fraud detection bot hallucinated that my e-book was plagiarizing my paperback (it didn't realize they're the same book).”
What to check before you sign
The questions that surface this problem while you can still walk away.
- Ask for uptime and incident history, not just an SLA percentage
- Ask what happens on a breaking-news traffic spike, and who is on call
- Check whether your peak load sits inside their standard tier or an enterprise one
- Confirm the rollback path if a release breaks the site
Not sure which of these applies to you?
Answer four questions about your newsroom and we'll shortlist the tools that fit. We'll carry this problem across with you.
