Contact Online Reporter Sandra Gittlen Boiled down All the tips from this article in convenient wallet size. Review: High-end Web development tools A well constructed site can also help. Network World, 12/8/97. The town.online Woodward site NASA's Mars site Microsoft's IE page

By Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 12/8/97

When NASA decided to post pictures from the Mars Pathfinder mission on its Web site, Internet services manager Brian Dunbar expected the site's usual 500,000 hits a day to increase. But he didn't expect it to leap to 46 million hits in one day.

Meanwhile, Lawyers Weekly, a relatively obscure Massachusetts trade journal, became the target of mass attention when Cambridge, Mass., Judge Hiller Zobel decided to use its Web site to release his verdict in the British au pair murder trial. With triple the normal traffic, the site buckled even before he actually wrote his decision, let alone posted it.

And when Microsoft Corp. decided to release Internet Explorer 4.0 online, it had a contingency plan in place for how users would best access the site. But the 176 million visitors to the site on the first day of availability did not all go away happy.

Such server-crashing events are happening with increasing frequency. Although your Web site may never be called on to handle millions of user requests in one day, the growing popularity of the Web means you should gear up for unexpectedly large page requests over a short period of time.

But how does a site even start to prepare for such rare occasions that hamper its ability to guarantee rapid resonse times? There are several options, according to the administrators of sites that have undergone nightmarish loads.

Monitor the situation

But equally important, he says: Get the people who prepare the site's content to give a week or two worth of notice when something big is going to be posted on the site.

It's the simple things that count

Dave Forrester, senior Web architect for TVisions, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., Internet development company, agrees. He said temporarily turning off bandwidth hogs such as chat areas, interactive services and advertising, can free up bandwidth and server space during crunch time.

Ramping up for the info highway

The problem, of course, is that all this can cost a lot of money.

An estimate from UUNET places the start-up cost of a data center with 10M bit/sec of fractional T-3 service with a backup T-1 line at $87,700. Actually staffing this Web center and upgrading the hardware and software will run you roughly $26,000 a month.

But Sinclair warned administrators to only add servers that can be used elsewhere in the organization after the traffic has died down. He also said to decide on a single type of server and then have them configured and ready to go in case usage increases rapidly.

Another way to prepare for heavy loads is to ensure that servers are as few hops as possible away from a heavy-duty 'Net backbone.

''We are going to move the physical hardware closer to MAE-East so that there are fewer hops for traffic to travel,'' NASA's Dunbar said. Vienna, Va.-based MAE-East is a metropolitan-area exchange point for Internet traffic on the East coast, operated by WorldCom, Inc.

Let somebody as possible else do the cooking

An ISP with a good server farm may have more flexibility to gear up for usage spikes than an internal Web effort. And when it's all over, you won't be stuck with machines or bandwidth you no longer need.

''You don't want to plan for a Super Bowl Sunday moment all year long,'' Sinclair said.

For about an initial cost of $5,000 and a monthly fee of $3,000, Web site administrators can leave the worrying to their ISP, Hoffman said.

That's the model adopted by Community Newspapers, a Boston-area newspaper chain whose Louise Woodward site developed an international following. The company hosts its content on servers owned by GTE Internetworking.

''It's scary when your site becomes newsworthy, because you just don't flip a switch and double or triple your capacity,'' said Eric Bauer, editor of the chain's Web site, townonline.com.

''With outsourcing, an ISP can increase your capacity or reroute your connection to more efficiently handle traffic increases on the fly,'' he said.

''You can ramp up or ramp down as necessary,'' Hoffman said. Few sites maintain a steady stream of high volumes. It could take six weeks to install a T-3 line, a time luxury Lawyers Weekly simply did not have, he added.

However, as Sinclair points out, many companies already have the connections, equipment and technical personnel on-site and, therefore, that cost is skewed.

Mirror, mirror

Mirror sites offer a way to expand capacity with [relatively] little expense, Dunbar said.

To keep Mars picture seekers from overloading its own servers, NASA turned to partners, including other government space centers, universities and private companies such as Silicon Graphics, Inc. and Digital Equipment Corp. These other entities agreed to host copies of the Mars pictures on their sites, often in exchange for the publicity.

After Pathfinder landed, visitors to the main NASA site were given a list of these sites and asked to pick the nearest one, thus spreading the load over a number of servers and reducing the potential for bandwidth and server congestion at any one site.

For the cost of renting or purchasing connection lines in and out of mirror sites, a Web site administrator can offload the same images and data available on their Web site to other servers.

The actual mirroring, or copying, of files can then be done via relatively simple FTP commands.

Lawyers Weekly got a number of offers from other sites, including townonline.com, to mirror its contents once Zobel announced his plans to use the site for his decision and news of its server crash spread, Bauer said.