As we saw last week even the big internet aware companies sometimes struggle with the traffic and hype that a new site can create.
Now in this case it was Microsoft and the site was the Windows7 beta, the main Windows7 site remained operational but the page to sign up and the 2.5Gb and 3.5Gb iso images were a little on the slow side and even at one point completely unavailable.
What happens when an Australian state government launches a $1.7 million tourism campaign? Would you want to a least look at a website that offers a dream job living on a tropical island for 6 months and getting paid for it?
The Queensland government here in Australia has posted job ads in media all over the world looking for someone to live on Hamilton island for 6 months. The successful candidate will have to blog and use other internet services to talk about their experiences.
You might think that since that if the candidate is a success then the site they create will get a lot of traffic and therefore the people running the marketing campaign might have some scalable infrastructure behind their site. Well it seems they don’t, since launch the site has mostly been unavailable or incredibly slow.
It looks like they have used http://www.aussiehq.com.au/ for the hosting and the server is based in Melbourne and doing a reverse IP lookup shows that islandreefjob.com is the only site on the IP address, so I guess that is better than a shared host. Looking at the details for the dedicated hosting packages it shows the the port speed is only 10Mbit, since they want people to send in videos as part of the application process, hmm looks like someone didn’t really think this through.
Who do you think sat in the meeting and said “Sure we’ve got $1.7 million to spend but lets just go with the cheap hosting and save the rest for the end of year Christmas party”