Obvious Mistakes Caused Europeana Site Failure

“Nevertheless, he points out that the Web host felt the initial
estimate of hits per hour, around 3 million, was far too ambitious,
and urged the Europeana team to lower its expectations. Instead of
buying proper load balancers to handle the Web site traffic, the
host used virtual, software-based load balancers, which are far
less reliable, but are a good deal cheaper.

“”We recommended hardware load balancers, but it’s a question of
money,” said Sjoerd Siebinga, one of Europeana’s developers. “We
didn’t have a budget to buy hardware,” he said. A pair of proper
load balancers cost around 30,000 to 40,000 euros.”

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