schweb

Hi David, Our main point of contact for the school will have received further information on the outage you mention above but I thought I would take this opportunity to respond directly to the post. The cause of the issue was a hardware failure with the load balancer on one segment of our infrastructure (hence the reason that the outage only affected a small number of schools as you mention later). Whilst we cannot rule out completely that the failure itself was in part traffic related the infrastructure segment had been load tested to a much greater capacity many times before. We also succeeded in replacing the component in under 1 hour to resume service to those schools affected by the outage. Our hosting provider Rackspace UK have already put in measures to ensure if the same component fails in future, normal service is resumed in minutes rather than an hour. Incidentally, we run both a private and public cloud infrastructure which at peak times give us almost unlimited capacity in terms of dealing with traffic spikes. We certainly do not host 800+ websites on a single web server. We would also not recommend a client load testing their own site. If this is necessary it is something that can be conducted on behalf of a customer, ideally on a test version of their site. It is also likely that the bandwidth of the user running the test would choke way before reaching even a reasonable simulation of a snow spike. The traffic would also probably be flagged as a DOS attack if the supplier were not aware of what you were doing.