Hey WotC, SHOW ME THE SLA!!!

[Xyxox]

WotC servers are still down for D&D content. Their IT deparment failed to meet the requirements of the marketing intiative for a flagship product for whatever reason. MArketing could have lowballed estimates. IT could have underpowered the server. The reasons could be many but this is a marketing push.

D&D Insider is a hosted service and as such, uptime metrics have much higher expectations.

WotC must provide a Service Level Agreement for thes services. Expectaions for up time, data rentention and protection and penalties for fialing to meet those SLAs need to be spelled out in the subscription agreement.

IF WotC provides no SLA, you might as well flush the subscription fee down the toilet.

 

[Asmor]

This is fairly common... Not saying it's excusable (especially since it's been over 12 hours and the site still isn't up!), but it is common. Every MMORPG fails horribly in those first couple weeks as it gets hammered, for example. Hell, Blizzard's website is completely inaccessible whenever a patch comes out because of everyone hammering it for patch details.

It's a bigger problem for websites than for games, though, because websites generally have a particular level of traffic, but at certain points that level can absolutely skyrocket, and there's no way that I know of to compensate for that. I don't know much about higher level web hosting, but I don't think it's possible to call up someone and say "Hey, Bob, we're going to need to buy an extra 100 gigs of bandwidth for our big announcement Tuesday," but rather you need to pay for your bandwidth for a whole period (like a month of whatever).

Of course, that's assuming it's a bandwidth issue and not a processing issue. If it IS an issue with their server simply not being able to handle the load, then they really can't buy a server just for a few days.

You know, I bet someone could make a lot of money offering temporary high volume hosting for just this sort of situation.

 

[Cergorach]

MArketing could have lowballed estimates. IT could have underpowered the server. The reasons could be many but this is a marketing push.

In all probability, Marketing didn't communicate they have a site to IT ;-)

 

[Drkfathr1]

Doesn't bode well for the Digital Initiative if they can't even keep their site up for an announcement that they KNOW would be big.

 

[Aexalon]

/.-ed

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/16/2334255 didn't exactly help either ...

 

[Alnag]

Well... one thing is, it went down. OK. It is not good, but it might happen. The completely other thing is, it is still down. That is bad... very bad.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

It is probably a internal protest from the tech people at WotC. I bet they all wanted to go to GenCon, but were told they couldn't because they had to be on hand for the big 4nnoucement.

 

[WayneLigon]

When has anyone ever seen a site make a big announcement and then not fall flat on it's face as millions of lemmings stampede the place? Business as usual.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'd expect they're already at least planning to add servers and bandwidth ... the virtual tools they are planning are going to take some serious processing power and bandwidth if they expect the entire D&D community to be using them the way they are advertising.

 

[Finglas]

/.-ed

Yep, that's good enough for me, explains everything. ;-) Seriously, I'm wondering, does anyone know what the stats are on the percentage of sites that DON'T go down when that happens? Can't be too high, that's for sure!