[WikiEN-l] In praise of the tech people

[Neil Harris]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/11/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> While we're praising things... I just wanted to say that the other day
>> my internet connection was bad and I had a hard time reaching the
>> 'pedia and I remembered that less than a year ago there were almost
>> constant technical problems relating to hardware, databases, servers,
>> etc. I can't remember the last time there was even protracted time of
>> server downtime or really annoying "experiencing difficulties" every
>> time you tried to submit something.
>>     
>
> You and I are using different Wikipedias, or at different times of day
> :) I'm not complaining at all about what the tech people get done with
> very limited resources, but you couldn't compare it to the 0% downtime
> of other similarly-popular websites.
>
> Though I have to say the most common problem for me is not being able
> to save changes to a page, and having to retry several times, which
> probably doesn't affect casual browsers.
>
> Steve
>   

Just to put things in context, WP is currently #17 in Alexa's rankings.

Its nearest neighbors in the rankings are:

#14 microsoft.com
#15 yahoo.com.cn
#16 google.co.uk
...
#18 google.co.jp
#19 blogger.com (ie, Google again)
#20 bbc.co.uk

Each of these WP "competitors" is run by an organization with a 
multi-billion-dollar annual turnover.

I'm sure that the current engineering team could achieve similar levels 
of reliability, given access to an IT budget similar to those available 
to these companies.

-- Neil