What would you do with a Gig? I hear that question all of the time. Well, if we all had a Gig I suspect we wouldn’t be reading about the Give to the Max servers today…
Despite hours offline due to a crush of traffic to its website, GiveMN.org’s one-day donate-a-thon Give to the Max raised a record $17 million for Minnesota nonprofits.
The number of donors, which topped 52,000, just missed last year’s record of 53,339.
The Pioneer Press had a late-night update of the donations totals after the event wrapped at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. Problems began appearing nearly 12 hours earlier, with prospective donors unable to register gifts (or sometimes, mistakenly double-donate). Minnesota Public Radio has comments from frustrated donors.
St. Paul-based GiveMN issued a statement that the volume of transactions had overwhelmed Razoo, its technology partner.
I love the idea of a day for donations. I’m glad that it seemed to work well at the end of the day. But you just have to wonder about what other ideas don’t get off the ground because the broadband isn’t there to support it.
All the news reports indicate that it was a server problem, not a bandwidth problem. And could it be possible that the server couldn’t keep up because the transactions were coming in so fast due to faster and faster broadband speeds made available every year?
I suspect that if the typical broadband speeds were higher, that folks would create servers that could handle more transactions.
Sort of like the age old debate: the chicken or the egg?
Exactly! I was in San Francisco last week – home to the BatKid Make-a-Wish story. At the events in town, they mentioned that the attention they received has also shut down their website – again probably servers. I guess in some cases the question is do you shoot for average days or burstable days both in terms of network and server capacity!