When you create your first website, the chances are that the only visitors will be you family, friends and colleagues. However, once it finds its way into the search engines, your site will start to receive visits from more people. If you're good at marketing, the amount of traffic your site receives per day could reach the thousands, or even millions. Yes, it's possible! As an example, the popular article marketing site, EzineArticles.com, receives over 1 million hits per day.
I million hits per day works out at an average of 11.6 hits per second, and that assumes that all the hits are spread out evenly throughout the day.
So imagine how many hits sites the most popular sites, Facebook, Microsoft and Google receive per second at their most busy times.
Clearly, these organisations have very powerful servers and connections to the Internet to be able to cope with the demand. The responses to requests for information from their sites are no worse than anybody elses'. Better in many cases.
My own websites are very unlikely to receive anywhere near the amount of traffic that these sites receive, and I am reasonably confident that the shared host server that I use has sufficent power to cope with the demand. If my sites become more popular, I would upgrade them to dedicated servers to cope. In the event of a miracle occurring and I started to receive daily hits in the order of millions, I would be looking at multiple servers with load-balancing.
So why am I writing this short article?
There's a site that I started using several years ago, called LinkedIn. It is a business networking site which helps you keep in touch with colleagues and contacts, and find new ones. It seemed to remain largely undiscovered for some time, growing steadily, but recently it seems to have caught the imagination of online marketers. This is probably due to the number of people using sites such as Facebook and Twitter for networking.
Recently, an ex-colleague of mine sent a request to add me to his LinkedIn network.
I followed the link in his email and was taken to the LinkedIn website, where I was presented with the signup page. As I already have a LinkedIn account I clicked the Login link. It took several attempts to finally get the Login page displayed, with most attempts timing out after several minutes. I'd say it took me about an hour to get to the login page. After entering my account details, is took me at least another hour to get logged in.
Finally, I was able to see my Inbox including my colleague's request. I clicked the link to read his request. Again, several attempts later I still couldn't see the request. Finally at 11.00pm I clicked the link and went to bed. At 7.15 the next morning, my browser told me that it was still waiting for the server. I clicked again and still no response.
I tried again from time to time. It is now 3 days after the request was sent and I still haven't managed to respond to it.
This is not the first time that I have had this trouble with LinkedIn, so it's definitely not a one-off problem.
I have also tried it with different browsers (Opera, Firefox, IE) and that made no difference. I can view and log in to other popular sites like Google and Facebook with no problems, so it's not my Internet connection or my PC.
So come on LinkedIn! Get your act together! If you're going to provide a networking site serving millions of people, sort out your infrastructure.
