Warning Sign: BarackObama.com Is Melting Down

I just did this a few minutes ago. I went to BarackObama.com and then I clicked to go to the dashboard. It took more than three and a half minutes to load up. I have had this problem for over a week now.

That is not a good thing.

Well, it is a good thing. This means many many people are visiting BarackObama.com, which is exactly what we have wanted to happen all along.

But it is not a good thing at all that the pages are taking so long to load. Or maybe it is not all the pages, just the dashboard for an active volunteer like me who is currently ranked 38th overall. That is a great ranking. I am thinking there are close to half a million people who have signed up at the site by now. I know the number was 300,000 months back.

I am ringing alarm bells.

This can not be forgiven. We as humanity already figured this out more than a decade ago even at a mass level. This is not rocket science. This is not expensive. You just increase the bandwidth substantially.

That is all.

At this rate the site is going to crash on January 4. That can not be allowed. We work so hard to get people to come to BarackObama.com. The greeting has to be a good one for when they do show up.

This is still a TV election. 2008 is not an internet election yet. But it is an internet election to the hard core. BarackObama.com is that space where the volunteers congregate.

This has to be taken care of now.

If there is even a single crash any time between January 3 and February 7, I am going to lose respect for the people at the Chicago headquarters for the first time. This absolutely can not be allowed.

You don't go on vacation when it is harvest season. January is harvest season. We worked so hard to get here. Most people will never see Barack Obama in person, most people will not go to an Obama event, most people will never meet an Obama volunteer, let alone an Obama staffer, but many will go to BarackObama.com as and when they finally get interested.

That interest will spike on January 4 after our Iowa victory. And to let the site crash even for a minute would be as good as sending our candidate off on a world tour in January. You are not needed in South Carolina, go see the world.

This is not complicated engineering at all. I am surprised I am even having to bring this up. Obama 2008 otherwise has been an organizational marvel. How did this escape attention?

Is it possible that the top staffers don't log into BarackObama.com several times a day? What's going on?

BarackObama.com is your office if you are a staffer or volunteer. That is where you go. You go elsewhere later. You go to an event later, after you first go to BarackObama.com.

Jack it up all folks. Purchase so much bandwidth the site flies through January just fine.

Don't you let it crash for even two seconds.

And make the loads fast. It should not take me three and a half minutes to load up my page on BarackObama.com, it should take two seconds, maybe three. And my broadband is actually slightly faster than normal cable broadband. This is not good. This is not good. This is not good at all.