IT Service Week

Last week I wrote a blog about what the cost of Twitter’s downtime means for a business in terms of revenue. This week I’d like to dedicate a small blog about capacity planning. Many of us in the United States are following the Presidential campaign more closely this year in the past than last because it is the first African-American candidate and the the first female candidate running not only for the democratic nominee but the chance to become President.

In addition, a number of changes have occurred since the last presidential election that make this 2008 election even more interesting. With approximately 215 million Internet users in the United States, a candidate must have a website operational for voters to review information about plans, policies, and contribute to the campaign.

I analyzed the domains of the republican candidate John McCain and the two Democratic candidates Obama and Hillary Clinton on compete.com. It was interesting to see that the growth of the traffic to the domains ranged from 434% - 826% of an increase in traffic from 2007. What do you do when your traffic increases 800% within one year? Most web-tier server deployments take 3-6 months in the enterprise from the time of planning to production stabilization. Thus when a candidate or company prepares to release big new to the press they need to have the proper architecture in place or run the risk of losing potential web visitors.

I analyzed each of the domains from an outside look to determine what each of the candidate’s technology teams have done to prepare for the high volume of unique visitors.

barackobama.com
Obama’s site reached a peak of 3 million unique visitors in February has the most unique visitors of the three candidate sites. According to Netcraft, the site was registered by godaddy.com and hosted in a Linux environment by a provider called Panther Express Corp. Panther has moved the site to at least 10 different IP addresses since it’s original location. This probably means that they were not originally scaled for the traffic and as traffic to the site increased they moved the domain to more powerful systems. The website is hosted with PWS Web Server on Linux. The site’s last reboot was 155 days ago so the uptime of the site has been available for the past 3 months without any downtime.

Full report on NetCraft

Another interesting thing I found about Obama’s site was that there is a sub-domain hosted by a different hosting provider with a different operating system and location. The sub-domain photos.barackobama.com is hosted with the FreeBSD operating system and the Apache 1.3.37 Web Server. They have purchased three IP addresses from Pair Networks to host the photos subdomain. When I go to this URL it forwards me to the flickr site for Obama with his campaign photos and more. So without knowing the internal architecture of the domain I’d imagine that this URL is just a forwarding URL and the main site hosted by Panther contains all of the site data.

Full report on NetCraft

hillaryclinton.com
Clinton’s site peaked at 1.5 million unique visitors in February. The domain was registered back in 1997 with Network Solutions and is hosted on one IP address with a Windows 2003 Server using IIS 6.0. The netblock is owned by Paul Holcomb from Palo Alto, CA. The last reboot was 23 days ago and most likely they are using Windows Clustered Services to maintain Clinton’s traffic on IIS and a load balancer between the IP and the Host.

Full report on NetCraft

Clinton also has a sub-domain hosted by a different company. Clinton’s contribution site, contribute.hillaryclinton.com is hosted by a company called Rackspace in San Antonio, TX. The site uses Apache 2.26 with the SSL module on Linux. Again, like the parent domain, this site is hosted on one visible URL so they could be using a load balancer as well.
Full report on NetCraft

johnmccain.com
McCain’s site has the least traffic of the three and peaked at about 750k visitors in the month of February. The domain was registered back in 1998 at godaddy.com and is hosted on an IP block owned by SMARTech Corp. McCain’s domain has the most interesting domain history in that the site was originally hosted by Blue Gravity Communications in 2005 on FreeBSD with Apache Webserver and then moved to SMARTech to be hosted on a Windows 2003 Server with IIS 6.0. The site was then moved again to another IP in the SMARTech server farm, but on another Windows server. Netcraft did not have an uptime graph for the site.

Full report on NetCraft

Conclusion
That was a lot of raw data. What I’ve found is that all three candidates are relying on hosting providers to manage and maintain their websites. Also, it appears that candidate’s have opted to split portions of their site to be hosted on two providers. Who has the best configuration? Well it would be tough to judge the architecture just by using NetCraft and Unique Visitor counts, but I’d say that hillaryclinton.com has made a good decision by splitting the contribution website to be hosted on a separate provider than the rest of the domain. This allows the hosting provider to manage the secure site separately from the rest of the domain. Most likely all three candidate’s are using a Load Balancing hardware device to divide the unique visitors amongst a cluster of servers.

What should a Candidate To-Be do to prepare their architecture for the traffic?
1.)Don’t attempt to host the site yourself, but rely on providers that have experience hosting and scaling large websites.
2.)Ensure that your Contribution website is secured and using a Web Server that utilizes SSL
3.)Use a Load Balancing Device to move traffic from one clustered node to another. If you have your site hosted by a reputable provider they will do this for you.