Expect the best but prepare for the worst

One of the sites we manage http://www.americanmedicalinnovation.org was hosting a large event today in Washington DC featuring CNN's Fareed Zakaria and U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Assistant to the President and Associate Director of Technology Aneesh Chopra among others. 

The event was streamed live via the website at http://www.americanmedicalinnovation.org/live and there was a massive amount of twitter activity around the hashtag #medinnovate.  So much so that it was the trending topic in the DC area on twitter.com.  While all this was great it is always more than a little stressfull to consider what would happen if the website went down.  We had no idea how many news services would pick up the event or what kind of international viewership we might get.  If people in India suddenly become interested in a webpage it can generate a lot of traffic!

With this in mind I setup a simple worst-case-scenario failover for the website.  Being a Drupal based website, when put under stress the first thing to creak will almost always be the database.  By default if anything goes wrong with the database, such as too many connections, Drupal will display a system themed (minelli for you hard core drupalers) Drupal page and proudly tell visitors that the database has failed because of too many mysql connections.  Not exactly an ideal situation.

Luckily drupal provides a method for overriding this behaviour and dropping in some code of your own.  In our case, rather than trying to provide a more attractive method of telling users that the site was broken, I setup a redirect to send users to another site with a stripped down page with nothing on it but the live feed from the event.  Sure they wouldn't be able to login and interact with the site but at least they would still be able to watch the event which is what 99% would have come there to do in the first place.

Thankfully the site held-up just fine and the redirect was never used but the planning for this event got me thinking about static pages and how they can help my clients should an unfortunate situation arise.  9 times out of 10 a static version of a website is better than no website at all.