I note that many people launching products on the Internet report ‘server-meltdown’. How much traffic can a dedicated server handle, do you know?

The tale is salutary, if you’re expecting a site-rush, unfortunately most of us aren’t, then you must make sure that your server can handle the load.

Stephen
http://www.stephenbray.com

I don’t think it’s just something you can switch on for a day or two and turn it off later.

As I understand the situation the Web site services are contracted out to Bell Canada. As a professional hosting company, that no doubt charges the government a fair wedge of cash, I’d say: yes, they can and should switch on more bandwidth and processing power.

There are many ways a professional hosting company can do this. If it’s a shared server (hosting lots of government sites), they could remove other sites on the same server. The database could be hosted on a seperate server, or multiple servers. Any non-essential images, stylesheets, and gratuitous Javascript could be removed during the times of high load. There are tonnes of things that could be done.

But no, they come out and say ‘try it later’. That doesn’t inspire confidence in the government, or Bell’s ability as a hosting provider!

A better suggestion I saw on one of the news sites was to open the registration list in advance of the effective date. That way people could sign up gradually without a big flood all at once.

At the unviersity where I work we’re developing plans for emergencies, including serious tragedies such as the Virginia Tech shooting. We have to plan to keep our website up if something really bad happens and we’re on CNN. You have to plan for it somehow. The CRTC spokespeople seemed totally at a loss and couldn’t even properly explain the situation.

The other reason why I say that is because it’s just good customer relations. Remembers when that cuil search engine launched and they made a big fuss about it but then the site didn’t work? Will anyone use cuil again? In this case it’s the government, and you don’t expect too much, but it does add to widespread belief that the government can’t provide good service.

I agree that it’s not a vital service and we surely can live without it for a few days. On the other hand, what happened and the way it was handled made the CRTC look pretty dumb. Seems like they didn’t expect the media outlets to pick up on it and weren’t prepared for something like this to happen.

While I don’t know much about high traffic systems like this, I don’t think it’s just something you can switch on for a day or two and turn it off later. It’s probably a large, long term investment, which doesn’t really make sense for a once every three years service like the DNCL.

But hey, maybe it is a vital service for you guys. Telemarketers are pretty annoying.