Government And Website Launches
On Tuesday the UK Police service launched a new website, with much fanfair, that allows you to see the crimes that have happened near where you live. This is part of the Government’s commitment to make data much more freely available than it has been in the past.
People are nosy. There’s no way around the fact that we just love to see what our neighbours are doing and to investigate the area around us. Every time a website like the crime maps, a new census, or noise maps launches the same sequence of events happen. The are news stories on TV, on radio and online and then the website crashes. We end up with stories like this and people will, in general, never go back.
If you investigate where this new site is hosted you’ll find it’s on RackSpace, who offer a cloud hosting service so really there’s no reason for the site to go down. Although the site is interactive there is no user generated data so the site should be easily scalable.
The site cost £300,000 to develop, and although 75,000 hits a minute is a lot surely will a little bit of thought the site should have scaled fairly easily?
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