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Blame Marketing For Website Crashes
from the heard-this-before? dept
I'm pretty sure that similar studies have been done in the past, but every time another well hyped website launches and immediately crashes people wonder what the people who run the site were thinking. They knew they would get lots of traffic and seem unprepared for it. This doesn't apply to sites that are suddenly thrust into traffic, but any of these hyped up projects that gets launched only to find the website can't handle the traffic. The latest study basically says that the blame isn't on the technical staff, but on the marketing folks who never bothered to tell the IT staff what to expect. Still, it would seem like for most of those sites, it would make sense to put in place plans to handle large bursts of traffic no matter what the marketing department said (or didn't say).
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Fault: IT
Marketers ALWAYS talk up the numbers. Numbers of people they are contacting, number of people interested, number of people buying, WAY off predictions.
In the real world, it's the IT department's job to set up the technical end to support the expected traffic AND to speak with "management" to come up with a reasonable expectation (management will mediate cost versus the wildly unbelieveable claims marketing tends to make)...simply throwing tens of thousands of dollars away in technical infrastructure because marketing says something big is gonna happen is not exactly atypical of a startup either. A traffic crushed website means neither of these things happened because they are horribly understaffed or underfunded. At least they have popularity.
It amazes me how UTTERLY HORRIBLE it was to have your website down in 1999 while nowadays it's almost expected of a popular site from time to time. Culture wars.
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Re: Fault: IT
WTF? Do you WORK in IT at all? Do you realize the hell one has to go through to do things like, oh, add a load balancer ($14,000) to the web server farm? How about the $$ it costs to add a redundant ISP link?
The Marketing/Finance droids see that as just another expense and very often do NOT realize how important it is.
the fact that often marketing types fail to communicate with the IT department in the first place explains the capacity failure. The article clearly noted that.
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Re: Fault: IT
If "management's" sole function is to mediate between two teams that throw around wild-ass guesses, they have a lot more problems then a few crashing servers.
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amen
Go work in a real IT department; money is a constant problem since management usually can't see that the future requires cashflow for technology.
...and I am surprized that the dorpus user isn't on this one spouting some slashdot verbiage that is so far off base no one pays attention to it.
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It's not easy
One of the challenges of running a Website is that you never know what to expect. For example:
Slashdotting, Denial of Service and Scaling.
If your system gets overloaded, it can be very difficult to even logon to your servers, let alone fix the bottleneck.
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Re: It's not easy
Yeah, but you misread. I said those sudden unexpected bursts can't be prepared for adequately in many cases -- but a company that is built on hype at expected launch should be prepared for what comes at that launch.
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