Forgive the (lack of) jargon. I'm not terribly tech-savvy. But does anyone have any experience running a website? I ask, because I attend a tier 1 university; they announce registration dates months beforehand, and then, once it arrives, the server crashes. Every time. For 3 years now. Based on the university size, the traffic is about 3,000 or so people at once when it opens, but today is summer registration, so I'm guessing it's 1,000 or less. This even happens for football season tickets (the entire student section is 2,000-3,000, so assume the traffic is half that on "opening day"). I find it to be totally unacceptable, but am I not acknowledging the fact that this is a difficult thing to do? It just seems like something that should not happen with a flagship, tier 1 university.
I bet they are hosting on their own servers and use that as a real world teaching aid for the IT students.
There are a lot of factors involved. But if it's a Tier 1 university, I would imagine they have the resources available to handle it. That said, I don't know anything about their normal traffic numbers. If they get very minimal traffic and then a surge of 3000 for one day each quarter, it might be tough to justify budget wise. Nothing wrong with having your own servers like they do. But if that's the grand scale of it, they should be able to get it handled without much additional expense.
Yes. They are probably hosting on a local server that is either outdated or not large enough to handle the capacity, even as small as it is. Everything we do for our sites is on cloud based servers. We only host our development sites on local, but I will be changing them to the cloud as well in the near future. They should have someone in IT smart enough to move away from local servers given the incident happening once, let alone twice. The fact it continues to happen means they really have their heads in the sand.
