Hello, this was a very important item that I didn't win that my snipe was nearly $200 over what it sold for. This was the only item I had a bid on ending at that time, and I don't see anything strange in the bid log, why wasn't this item won?

Hello Daniel,
Thank you for the inquiry about the snipe. We have been investigating this. We just moved to a new provider based on last year's database issue. It was latency (delay) but we're making sure it wasn't on our end.
On a separate note, I noticed that for higher-dollar items over $500, you sometimes don't win in tie situations. To improve your chances in these cases (and generally), I recommend placing your bid with a 5-second lead time. This allows for the minimum bid increment to work in your favor. Submitting a bid 4-5 seconds before the close is still late enough to avoid bids from bidders not using automated bidding.

The issue was on our end. During last week’s planned move to a new database provider, everything went smoothly. But we didn’t allocate enough memory for the database, which is why the problem didn’t appear until Sunday night (prime time).
So it was human error basically, not a system failure.
The move was planned a year ago when we realized we’d outgrown our original provider. We have always placed snipes from multiple locations, but from a central database. Now, the database itself is multi-regional.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.