Like many small business owners, Brett Rosenthal, the founder and president of ThatsMyShirt.com (and several other t-shirt sites), gets a lot of help from friends and family, including his brother, Reid, who model many of the company’s cool t-shirts.

However, when Reid appeared on season five of the popular ABC reality show The Bachelorette earlier this year, his brother got more help selling his t-shirts than he – or his e-commerce host – could handle.

“In June and July our sites spiked in traffic significantly due to Reid being on The Bachelorette,” Rosenthal explained. “This would have been great for business, however our existing carrier could not handle the load and we lost a lot of business as a result.”

Even when the show ended, interest in Reid and his t-shirts did not. And Rosenthal got nervous. “We’d been experiencing a lot of timeouts and server issues – and we couldn’t process or even view or edit orders,” he said.

On top of that, customers were getting error messages when attempting to add items to their cart or checkout, so they left. “And we were getting scared of what the holiday rush would be like based on this traffic we saw from Reid.”

In order not to lose critical holiday business, Rosenthal went in search of a new hosted solution, one that would be easy to use, easy to customize and that wouldn’t conk out during peak periods.

After looking at many different hosted solutions, Rosenthal chose BigCommerce, which bills itself as “the world’s easiest to use e-commerce software.”