Today the Daily Princetonian, the student paper at Princeton University, ran a provocative op-ed on its website. It wasn't the most scandalous article the Internet has ever seen, but it had enough buzz factor to draw attention within and beyond the sphere of Princeton.
What happens next is all too common in these situations:
WEBSITE. DOWN. The traffic from inbound links on Twitter and elsewhere was enough to bring the site down completely for many visitors.
So the Daily Princetonian is still down.
— Geoffrey Skelley (@geoffreyvs) March 29, 2013
The Daily Princetonian site is down. How am I going to know how to find a husband now?
— Irin Carmon (@irincarmon) March 29, 2013
I can't get on to The Daily Princetonian website to read the infamous lady letter and it's killing me...
— grace wyler (@grace_lightning) March 29, 2013
We set up a website monitor to run real-browser tests from around North America every two minutes. After a couple hours, the monitors reported a staggering 8% uptime, with only 6 out of 76 samples completed (the rest timed out).
The 6 samples that did go through were painfully slow. This filmstrip is from one of the successful browser tests. No paint events occur in the browser until 17 seconds, and the text of the article doesn’t appear until almost 19 seconds.
Uptime is not just an eCommerce Concern
At Yottaa we often talk to eCommerce website owners. For them, downtime has a direct, dollars and cents effect on their revenue. The owners take measures to protect their sites from downtime due to spikes in traffic, with 100% availability the goal.
Media sites are way behind in this regard. These sites are often slow to begin with -newspapers and magazines are some of the slowest sites when we test performance. They are stuffed with media files and third party domains to the point where they resemble Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote (to a performance expert, at least).
But media sites are also ill prepared for significant load. The case of Princeton is a convenient example, but we see this almost daily. An influx of traffic - even one that is tiny compared with spikes that are withstood by larger sites - is enough to cripple smaller ones.
“So what,” you say – a site goes down for awhile. It will come back.
We think downtime is a big deal for media sites, for three reasons:
1. Advertisers are losing. For a small publication, ad revenue from websites may be a major source of income. If they can report big traffic from popular articles, that’s progress. They can make more money in the future. But downtime can ruin that. The Princetonian may be well funded, but standalone blogs and alternative papers are not. They need those impressions.
2. You lose the conversation. No matter what the nature of the content is, if you publish it, your site should be the focal point of conversation. People will comment, read the comments, respond to comments, and link back to the original text – provided they can access the site. If they can’t, a substitute will be found before you can blink.
In the case of today’s op-ed, IvyGate and BusinessWeek both had the full text up within an hour of reports that the site was down. Conversations will occur on social media no matter what you do, but you can make sure that much of the traffic that results from those conversations comes back to your site – again, as long as it’s up.
@sc_k i just read it at, is this the same thing you read?businessinsider.com/princeton-wome…
— lance newman (@engineerhunter) March 29, 2013
Omg. This column at the Princetonian. ivygateblog.com/2013/03/heres-…
— Magdalena Gil (@magdalenagil) March 29, 2013
3. The site looks like a joke. Just look to twitter. When a site goes down, it becomes the subject of ridicule. Whether the ridicule is warranted or not, it’s embarrassing.
Lol @princetonian site down.
— sixillis (@humancity) March 29, 2013
@princetonian oh dudes. @jezebel's comments aside ... you've accidentally stumbled onto a hot topic. Get your site up Tigers.
— mcbc (@mcbc) March 29, 2013
How to Stay Up when Traffic Spikes
If this was 1998, we could let smaller sites off the hook. Back then preparing for load meant increasing infrastructure, at great cost and time spend. A site like the Princetonian that typically serves a small slice of very localized traffic (and an even smaller slice of global traffic) would not be expected to have robust infrastructure for the off-chance something goes viral.
But this is 2013. Any media site worth its salt is seeking to become more than local. (Case in point: Guardian, the UK newspaper, going all-in on North American markets online).
And more importantly, infrastructure has been commoditized. Content delivery networks are a dime a dozen. For pennies on the infrastructure dollar, sites can be hooked into a massive, global network that can scale to meet the demands of traffic. No proprietary hardware, no expensive installs – nearly instant scale via the cloud. There’s no excuse! Get scalability!