This weekend has seen a few opportunities for various organisations to do better with their internet service performance. On-line coverage of sports events isn’t yet quite up to the demands from the public.
This is Saturday afternoon, the wife was wanting to get further information on the Queen’s club tennis matches that she was watching on television. An attempt the visit their site resulted in an 503 HTTP error message. This was a nicely formatted standard Drupal error message pane, and advised to try reconnecting later. This occurred shortly after the BBC announced on their coverage that the final on Sunday was moved from 2:30pm to 12:00pm to avoid the rain that is forecast. (Tennis and rain in Britain are constant enemies during the summer months here)
I’m a fan of the Le Mans 24 hour race, so was wanting to catch up with the start of the race, I visited the website www.lemanslive.com (owned by Michelin, one of the primary sponsors) to obtain the live text information, However at 2:00pm GMT, the site crashed. Since this happens at 3:00pm CET, the start of the race, it’s quite obvious that this is due to overloading.
In the end, I switched to using the updates provided by the ACO on twitter via @24hoursoflemans
The site at the moment redirects to their facebook page, (although it wasn’t doing this until earlier on Sunday morning) so again this is an indication that by hosting things in the cloud, they were quickly able to provide the scaling requirements needed to handle the large number of users that can flood in, without having to deploy their own infrastructure, which did not appear suited to the task at hand.
Given the changes and the links that were previously setup prior to the LeMans weekend, this obviously has cost them several opportunities to place product information in front of potential customers during the course of the weekend. Without the opportunity for placement, and for the poor experience delivered, this can seriously harm brand value and customer perception. All of these are opportunities missed.
Oh, and congratulations to Audi for winning, and I’m thankful that the crashes didn’t lead to any severe injuries.
