So a fair few people tuned in to see the inauguration of America's first black president, Barack Obama yesterday. As historic events go, it was pretty historic, Sneak reckons, probably a nine or ten on the historic scale. And yet some high-profile sites still managed to fail to build in enough extra capacity to cope with the spike in visitors. Sigh.

When will they learn, eh? So says web hosting firm Hostway, one of the first to jump in and warn firms that "they run the very real risk of viewers going elsewhere" if IT teams can't cope with these events without their sites going down.

Sneak couldn't agree more. One particularly high-profile site, which might or might not be an anagram of BCB, was stuttering like Gareth Gates during the historic event. Now this site is probably not going to suffer too much from a one-off like this, but others may find their customers a little less forgiving in future.

In defence of web site owners everywhere, however, most appear to have done pretty well to cope with the massive demand. According to Arbor Networks, video streaming of the ceremony resulted in a 40 per cent increase in activity for some American service providers; one of the single largest one-day spikes in Internet traffic since the firm began monitoring five years ago. Ouch.

21 Jan 2009