[balloot]

It should be noted that healthcare.gov might be the highest traffic website launch in the history of the internet. With millions of visitors on day one, I certainly can't think of one that would even compare.

They are dealing with scaling issues that are almost completely unprecedented. Every other e-commerce site that deals with many millions of visitors a day has had months, if not years, to figure out the touchy parts of their infrastructure and make adjustments while the traffic ramps up.

Given this, I can't help but think that 90% of the scorn heaped upon healthcare.gov is politically motivated. When Twitter spent YEARS going down on a regular basis, or Simcity just completely shut down on launch day (with a fraction of the users of Obamacare), nobody demanded the companies that running them be shut down. Shit happens when you build a website that gets incredible amounts of traffic. It will work out just fine.

[wdr1]

> It should be noted that healthcare.gov might be the highest traffic website launch in the history of the internet. With millions of visitors on day one, I certainly can't think of one that would even compare.

I can think of two that I've worked on personally:

- Yahoo!'s tribute site for the first anniversary of 9/11 - Ticketing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Yes, in both cases, the companies had experience & infrastructure for building high-scale website, but that should have been a requirement for the entities building healthcare.gov as well.

In both cases I've cited there were a lot of significant changes to the technical stack (e.g., it was first time we used PHP for a large scale project at Yahoo!).

TL;DR: This isn't really excusable.

[pandaman]

Simcity is exchanging orders of magnitude more data between each client and the server with much stricter latency requirements. Same applies to Twitter (though the data density is less than in a game there are more connections and the volume of data is higher). I don't see how a website that serves static (in the sense they do not change over time, like twitter feeds or game sessions) pages is comparable to either.

[thwarted]

Every other e-commerce site that deals with many millions of visitors a day has had months, if not years, to figure out the touchy parts of their infrastructure and make adjustments while the traffic ramps up.

And how much those months or years of experience were leveraged in figuring out the touchy parts of the infrastructure? This shouldn't have been the first rodeo for anyone involved. There are numerous blog posts, books, videos, etc with ideas, what works, and what doesn't, for running websites of all sizes. Many of them are posted and debated on this very site.

[akjetma]

I don't think what happened with SimCity supports your argument. People were outraged about it for weeks.