For Bargain America, it was too much of a good thing. Every time the company's CEO, Tom Sato, would go on television or be quoted in a Japanese magazine, the online retailer of U.S. goods to Japanese consumers was inundated with hits on its site. Invariably, this would bring down the Web server, which in turn left many customers unable to get through to the e-tailer or, worse, left them frozen in the middle of a transaction. "We would have to restart the server every time this happened," says Randy Reisinger, the San Jose, California-based company's VP and chief operating officer, who was also involved in the site's technical development. "If people were already online placing orders, we'd have to kick them off momentarily."
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