[jimduk]

Weirdly, IMHO, one of the great advantages of the early BBC website infrastructure was directly because they had no state or need for customisation or dynamic pages.

Some BBC Techs told me, back in the early days (1997?-2004?) when other companies were fighting with Vignette and Bea and IBM etc. and worrying how to balance the database, thread, webserver pool for high scale sites, and falling over at every high traffic moment, the BBC had this monster static Apache estate off loads of servers, with a hand-built Perl scheduler which essentially copied your 'subsite' or changes to a subset of these static servers, from whatever static ingest you gave it. This meant as long as you had a semi-centralised site/ information architecture and a good team on the Perl scheduler and load balancing; any internal content subteam could go off and build what they wanted, with whatever CMS/hand tools they had, as long as it spat out a static staging site the Perl scheduler could handle. This model/process/ org structure way out-performed the rest of the UK internet in uptime/performance/cost, and it let a thousand flowers bloom; but only for a one-way read only system - no custom content/ ads/ offers/ personalisation - probably hard to even do centralised log analysis.

<NB agree with Lattelazy - do let the BBC keep innovating, they have come up with some great stuff in content and tech, so keep keep giving them the chance>