Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/11/06, Fastfission fastfission@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