DEC Alphas for Firstnight Boston?

[Mark J. Dulcey]

On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, Rich Braun wrote:

> > Last year's site was done by a commercial providor, and it
> > crashed on firstnight.
> 
> Hmm, Dreamcom is a relatively new (commercial) provider--can they
> handle this either?  I remember the First Night crash last year--was at
> my office poking at various net sites, wondering whether to escape Back
> Bay or to stick around, and wound up going to the movies instead. :-)
> 
> We have a customer who would be interested in this application.  His
> company wrote software which automatically diverts traffic from one
> server to another if any of them fails.  We can also get space on a server
> down at MAE-East, if you really want robust guarantees that the site cannot
> and will not go down.

The problem at the commercial provider last year (BBN Planet) was that 
their server folded under the load, not that they ran out of bandwidth.
The question is how solid the server software itself is under heavy 
load.  Few sites have been tested under the sort of load that the First 
Night server got.