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"By Theo Schlossnagle, CEO, OmniTI\nIn an era of cheap bandwidth, hardware, and programmers, executives have forgotten &amp;#8212; to their detriment &amp;#8212; how to prepare for the consequences of website failures.\nPopular opinion holds that Web 2.0 is a surge of innovation heretofore unseen on the Internet.\u00A0 Many, like Marc Andressen, argue that one of, if not the most, important contributors to this innovation is access to cheap bandwidth, programmers, hardware and software.\nMy experience leads me to a different conclusion.\nWhile this unprecedented access to resources is certainly an enabler, I believe that on the Internet, design and implementation have a paradoxical crossover and pure opportunity is the single largest contributor to innovation.\nIn fact, the access to abundant and inexpensive resources is a mixed blessing. Cheap access and abundance might be an enabler, but the resulting inefficiencies and sub-par talent can handicap innovation and serve to fatally cripple companies at the very time when their ideas are ready to bear fruit.\nSucceeding despite ourselves\nThe Web itself is quite young when compared to other technology verticals (e.g. storage, servers, networking). The truth is that we still struggle with how to make it all work, especially under extreme conditions.\u00A0 It\u2019s no trivial task to build a single website servicing a thundering, global herd, as traffic-related site failures in 2009 by giants such as J. Crew \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tJCG\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t and eBay \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tEBAY\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t remind us. More disturbingly, Microsoft \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tmsft\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t demonstrated that without proper maintenance, sites don\u2019t even need a traffic surge to fail.\nWhile the \u201Cbig boys\u201D usually build and maintain Web properties quite well, failure is exponentially more dangerous for Web upstarts trying to establish themselves, many of whom fight and claw to get a chance to make an impression with a user, only to see their site crash when traffic arrives because of poor site planning and implementation.\nThink back to the growing pains Twitter faced in 2009. The \u201Cfail whale\u201D became synonymous with Twitter! Clearly, Twitter\u2019s brilliant management team didn\u2019t adequately prepare for the very success they were striving. Fortunately for them, the power of their idea kept people coming back. But few are so lucky.\nThe uncomfortable irony is that the most innovative and promising sites, whose business plans are built to rapidly grow traffic, often forget that building a business that can scale with a solid, optimized tech infrastructure goes hand in hand with success.\nIt\u2019s our own fault\nThere is a famous quote in computer science attributed to our patriarch Donald Knuth of Stanford University:\n\u201CPremature optimization is the root of all evil.\u201D\nThis, however, is a snippet that abuses and misses the larger point from Knuth\u2019s full statement:\nThere is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse \u2026 We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.\u00A0 A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.\nIn other words, 97% of the time, we waste too much time worrying about small efficiencies.\u00A0 But the other 3% of the time, what I argue is the most important 3%, we fail to make small, vital optimizations that prepare for the onslaught of traffic that we\u2019re trying to generate.\nThe \u201Ctech side\u201D of the industry continues to believe that because computers are getting faster and cheaper, it is better to innovate without optimizing because it enables them to get to market faster and optimization was something they could fix if it became a problem.\nIn my experience auditing and providing guidance on building websites, failure to find and correct that all-important 3% results in rampant inefficiencies: too much equipment provisioned, outrageous bandwidth usage, frequent and prolonged outages, overstaffing, and a loss of agility, resulting in an acute and profound loss of competitive advantage.\nWith programmers, hardware and software in abundance, it is easy to manage Web projects as if the 3% can be erased with more elbow grease.\u00A0 Such a backwards looking, \u201CI\u2019ll fix it when I need to\u201D approach is a recipe for disaster.\nTake, for example, the case of promising startup Ma.gnolia.com, a social bookmarking site that attained critical buzz, only to suffer catastrophic data loss in February 2009. In a surprisingly candid podcast, founder Larry Haff detailed what went wrong:\u00A0 with the company focused on growth, he and his team missed opportunities to bolster the site\u2019s infrastructure, resulting in the unthinkable: total data loss and the need to start from scratch. More than six months later, Haff and team re-launched, but the site remains in private beta to \u201Ckeep Gnolia sustainable.\u201D\nMake no mistake: planning for the stampede, or even steady growth, is congruent with success. If you are successful in gaining traction and adopt the \u201CI\u2019ll optimize when it hurts\u201D attitude, you will be faced with inefficiencies, outages and general disadvantage at the worst time possible for your business: your moment of opportunity.\nTheo Schlossnagle is the CEO of OmniTI, a Columbia, Md.-based company that develops software and offers consulting services for highly scalable Web applications. He\u2019s also the author of the book \u201CScalable Internet Architectures\u201D (Published by Sams, 2006)."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2010/02/26/cheap-bandwidth-hardware-and-programmers-entrepreneurial-crack/>