“Following on from the success of the earlier CrimeMapper site which we developed for all 43 English and Welsh police forces in October 2009, the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) asked us to take it further, a lot further. On 1st February the new street level crime mapping and local policing website, covering England and Wales, was launched by Nick Herbert, Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice” announced Rock Kitchen Harris, a UK website design and public relations firm in the news section of their website
Rock Kitchen Harris continues “The site provides the most detailed crime information on this scale anywhere in the world. We not only designed, built and manage the site we also arranged the hosting using a mix of servers, with the public website using scaleable cloud hosting.”
They say if you build it, they will come. And with such pompous poo-poo being delivered by local media, come they did! As a result, the huge number of visitors appears to have swamped the police.uk site with traffic, causing it to break. Search results were returning error messages, or a blank page with a 503 Service Unavailable response header.
It is reputed to be on Amazon's cloud hosting.
Group buying service Groupon has resorted to a different tactic. Groupon blocks customer logins during high-traffic periods when running national deals. If you attempt to login to make a purchase, print a coupon or view your account, a page appears stating that the login functionality is not available due to extremely high demand. They suggest you make an order using the same email address as on your account. There is concern that Groupon’s deal bucks might not be applied to purchases since they aren’t logged in (there is a fine print notice that deal bucks will be applied if they are in your account when your order is processed).
The other issue with no ability to login is that you can’t easily print or retrieve your purchased Groupons. The message on the login page does provide an email address if you need to print or redeem a Groupon immediately but I have to imagine that email address will be hammered.
The price of success!
Fri, 4 February 2011, 14:42
The press release stated:
We not only designed, built and manage the site we also arranged the hosting using a mix of servers, with the public website using scalable cloud hosting"
With all the hype on cloud hosting and its scalability, some recent incidents are demonstrating that there are some chinks in the armour.
Groupon is resorting to blocking customer logins during high-traffic period...
If either of these examples were mom and pop style operations with budgets to match, a site brought down by a unexpected surge in traffic is unfortunate but not a reflection otherwise...
This was not Rock Kitchen Harris first kick at the can: “Following on from the success of the earlier CrimeMapper site which we developed for all 43 English and Welsh police forces in October 2009,"
Groupon is valued by some at a billion or more dollars... maybe they can afford to alienate their clients
Fri, 4 February 2011, 13:43
What's the point this article is trying to make? That websites go offline for various reasons?