What a week for the Web Team ! Firstly an apology to everyone that was on line on Wed 21 Oct when the web site ground to a halt. We knew it was going to be a heavy day on the website with all the events going on around the country - but we had underestimated just how heavy it was going to be!
Just in case you missed it - HMS ILLUSTRIOUS arrived in Liverpool for a 5 day high profile visit to celebrate Fly Navy 100; DEFENDER - the 5th of the T45 Destroyers - was launched in Barrow; it was Trafalgar Day so there was a service in St Pauls Cathedral and various dinners and parades took place throughout the country; and Princess Ann was visiting both HMS SULTAN and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard ! Phew ! All the events were a complete and resounding success - and to find out more take a peek at the stories published on the new pages (RN Live).
As we were expecting high traffic to the site (as normally happens for high profile events), we had put several measures in place. For weeks beforehand, the web team had taken a section each of the site to QA it and make sure the background information was correct and up to date. This is because most people that read press releases on the site then read around the subject to find out more. We made sure all the photos were refreshed so that regular visitors had new things to look at. We also ran ‘teaser articles’ on RNLive to let people know these events were coming.
On the evening before - we starting tracking specific parts of the site. This allowed us to monitor in real time which areas were ramping up in activity. This normally builds following coverage on the radio, TV or on one of big news websites. To help absorb the effect of the increased traffic, we also brought online additional servers - which gave us 100% more capacity - we also extended our caching to allow the servers to focus on the traffic rather than processes. We had a conference call booked at 1000 on 21 Oct with all key players fully briefed on their role. The worse that could happen wa for the site to crash - and for our viewers to not be able to get to the information they want. This affects us reputationally, but also means that people go and look for the information elsewhere and we’ve lost that audience. Several weeks worth of effort would all culminate in this next 24 hr period ! We had done all the planning - now it was time to cross our fingers and hope !
What made 21 Oct 09 unusual was the sheer number of unrelated events geograhically displaced. When you have just one major event it is fairly easy to predict when the surges to the website will be depending on what time press releases are due to be issued, which media companies are in attendance and which news slot were they aiming for (i.e. breakfast news/lunch time regional news). You can also take a pretty good guess which pages people will be interested in. On 21 Oct - we had a huge increase in people looking at RNLive (at the news articles), HMS ILLUSTRIOUS’ ship pages, the Fly Navy 100 pages, the regional pages, the historical pages for both FN100 and Trafalgar Day, the T45 future ships pages, the HMS DARING T45 pages, Historic Dockyard pages …. etc etc … oh, and all the blogs and diaries from the people involved in these events.
The first topic to ramp up was HMS ILLUSTRIOUS - the article advertising her arrival in Liverpool attracted 6000 hits in just minutes - normally the first few hours are fairly slow, then the figures ramp up. Very soon after, we started getting hit hard in all areas of Fly Navy 100, then the service finished at St Paul’s Cathedral… and then digital disaster almost hit ! One of the servers crashed through sheer bulk of traffic and the others were struggling to keep up with demand - although we didn’t actually crash - the whole site slowed down so much that to many users it looked like the whole site had frozen. Each time we tried to ‘jump start’ the system - the sheer bulk of traffic trying to log back on slowed us down again. As a result for 3 hours during the middle of the day - the site was incredibly slow.
So what have we learned from this ? Firstly that the Royal Navy had an amazing day on 21 Oct 09. With so much bad news in the press throughout society, it was really great to be part of several good news stories across the country. We succeeded in remembering our past, celebrating the here-and-now, and welcoming the future of the Royal Navy. Secondly, in terms of visibility the Royal Navy raised their profile across a broad range of ”audiences’. And finally, in website terms the acceptance that we are a victim of our own success and the website really is seen as the place to come and find out about the RN online. This gives us a massive boost and confidence in our plans for the future for the website. But that’s a subject for another blog….
