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1.  

   Fault: IT

   

   Jack9, Aug 4th, 2005 @ 10:50am

   
   

   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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2.  

   Re: Fault: IT

   

   Spam, Aug 4th, 2005 @ 12:15pm

   
   

   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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3.  

   amen

   

   bob, Aug 4th, 2005 @ 1:44pm

   
   

   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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4.  

   Re: Fault: IT

   

   Boilerbob, Aug 5th, 2005 @ 7:05am

   
   

   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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5.  

   It's not easy

   

   Pete Austin, Aug 5th, 2005 @ 8:16am

   
   

   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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6.  

   Re: It's not easy

   

   Mike (profile), Aug 5th, 2005 @ 9:18am

   
   

   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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