By Dennis McCafferty
This article appeared in the March 2005 edition of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here for a free subscription.
March 29, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Before December’s tsunami hit Asia, we could only imagine a disaster of its magnitude. We knew of events like the great storm surge that washed over Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900, a tragedy that took the lives of 6,000 in just a few hours, but not first-hand.
But on December 26, the tsunami’s impact was so much more at least 288,000, according to a February 18 report. And it happened at a time when, in addition to 24-hour coverage from cable news and radio, online resources were fully deployed to deliver the word on what was taking place. News sites broadcasted the latest streaming images. Bloggers worked to help distressed families by posting photos of their missing loved ones. Both online e-commerce businesses and non-profits combined efforts in full-force to ensure that anyone who wanted to give could do so. And people gave, in staggering amounts.
The Web hosting community was in the thick of this activity, ensuring connectivity, providing value-added services and even donating infrastructure to allow for such efforts to not only continue, but expand as demand and innovation took hold. The site management and Web hosting executives behind the wealth of online news, e-commerce, non-profit and information-sharing entities worked feverishly for days and weeks after the tsunami.
Internet users grew insatiable for more information whether those users were news junkies, family members of missing people or citizens who wanted to lend a helping hand to victims. Because of the response, search engine Google added a special link to its home page for information about the disaster as early as December 28. For the week ending December 27, the search terms “tsunami,” “earthquake” and “tidal wave” were all in Google’s top five queries. The next week, “tsunami” still held the top spot and “Red Cross” entered the list at number four. By mid-January, the term “tsunami” inspired 21.3 million searches on Yahoo!, and the combined terms “tsunami” and “missing” produced more than 2.5 million.
Top news organizations’ Web sites held up well under the demand. CNN.com, NBC.com, BBC.com and CBSNews.com all were among the sites that delivered a success rate of more than 99 percent with respect to connectivity during the week of January 10, according to San Mateo-based Keynote Systems Inc. (keynote.com), a Web performance management company.
Non-profit sites, however, lagged behind, overwhelmed at times by the crush of traffic from well-meaning users, with the Salvation Army site’s availability dipping as low as 90 percent at the peak of demand. Indeed, for some non-profits, the tsunami and its aftermath created a perfect storm of sorts. A major disaster captured the attention of the world during the holidays, when people were off from work and had time to respond at a time when goodwill toward man is at a peak. And it happened at a time when non-profits are strapped for cash to run day-to-day operations, including online efforts.
It was a telling sign of funding patterns and infrastructure prioritization, says Roopak Patel, a senior Internet analyst for Keynote. When it comes to site availability, the tsunami was really the first test case of its kind since the terrorist-launched attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
“This was the kind of event that demonstrated which sites would scale correctly and which sites wouldn’t,” Patel says. “Non-profit sites were not prepared for such a large outpouring of willingness to help. Their folks in information technology have been struggling for funding, and, as a result, have had little to no authority for capital expenditures. They’ve been told by their CEOs to make the best out of what they have. Even if they’ve been able to make incremental changes, it hasn’t been enough to keep up with needed capital investments. When you create a world-class Web site, it isn’t just about hardware. It’s about stability, network connectivity, the ability to scale with the database and the ability to scale with the connections.”
The news organizations learned their lesson with the September 11 attacks. Back then, Keynote reported “prolonged and consistent slowdown” for Web site performance overall, with CNN.com, NYTimes.com and ABCNews.com all experiencing zero percent availability between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. on the day of the attack. These problems, suffice to say, have been addressed.
“The news organizations know they need to be prepared for any sudden shift in demand for news,” Patel says. “They know now that the Web is a most critical media, and have accomplished what they’ve had to do to keep their sites up and running and connected.”
Despite the snags, users eventually connected with non-profit sites, and a staggering number of donations ensued. All told, online donations have reached more than $750 million, mostly from the US, according to Kintera (kintera.com), the San Diego-based Web host of such non-profit groups as UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, key players in the relief efforts.
In keeping such sites connected and running throughout the spikes in demand, Kintera’s Service Oriented Architecture was put to the test. It enables clients to quickly make modifications to their sites, and collect all transaction data in databases that support their back-end applications.
“Real-time information on donation amounts allowed our clients to modify their Web sites to fit the situation,” says Ephraim Feig, chief technology officer as well as chief marketing officer at Kintera. Feig says when donations to Doctors Without Borders were sufficient to meet the group’s emergency needs, the client was able to immediately post this information on its Web site and deploy collection mechanisms in support of its usual campaigns.
“This straightforwardness with the consumer base was hailed by the media as exemplary for fundraising in an emergency situation,” says Feig. “Supporting fixed applications for thousands of customers, even during unexpected heavy traffic, is standard nowadays. Making sure systems are up and running when changes are happening in near real-time is another story. The hosting company must give the client real-time access to information and enable the client to update its Web site, based on this information, in a very short period of time even if the update involves changing or adding workflow applications and transaction modules while still maintaining reliability and security. Hosting companies today not only host applications, they host full business solutions. And today’s solutions are dynamic, on-demand, and subject to enormous stresses. When done correctly for the non-profit sector, the net result is that donors and volunteers are more effective because of a heightened giving experience.’ In real time, they can share information, donate or register to volunteer, and receive feedback about the impact of their giving.”
At the US Fund for UNICEF, a home page was immediately created after the disaster, and an e-alert was sent to its subscriber list of 80,000. That list has since doubled. The high profile non-profit also tapped into Google’s AdWords to post ad banners on many top Internet properties. There was additional pro bono advertising put into place to further get the word out, as well as generous media attention from print, television and radio outlets. Online activity peaked at the end of January, with daily contributions averaging $2 million for a full week. The next week, donations averaged $1 million a day. The numbers are staggering, considering that UNICEF raised a total of $3 million online for all of the previous year. By the time the donations have ceased, UNICEF expects to have raised an estimated $300 million globally via online tools. Having a host that could stay on top of the dynamic shifts was essential, and Kintera rose to the challenge, says Tim Ledwith, the New York-based director of the US Fund for UNICEF’s interactive donor communications efforts.
“This was definitely a first time for us with regard to this scale we were transferring tens of millions of dollars several times during the course of this emergency,” says Ledwith. “UNICEF also set up a dozen or so employee giving sitelets’ for our corporate partners, who are matching their employee gifts. Kintera built most of the co-branded sites, which are linked to company’s intranet or email message. These efforts have raised about $500,000, which will be matched by the corporate partners themselves. We have also set up a Tsunami Relief Friends Asking Friends campaign targeted to our youth action list, using Kintera’s software. It’s another grassroots fundraising approach. Currently we have about 108 teams who use the fundraising tools to create personalized Web sites, and to send emails to friends and family to encourage them to give.”
Although tracking down its own total contributions is still in progress, and can’t even be estimated at this point, Atlanta-based CARE (care.org) indicates that up to 40 percent of total tsunami-related contributions was made online by users visiting CARE’s various Internet properties.
“This particular disaster showcased the power of the Web as a fundraising and communications tool in new ways it has definitely been a watershed moment for the medium in terms of fundraising,” says Toby Smith, Internet strategist at the organization. CARE quickly set up a donation option on the home page of its site, enabled matching gift campaigns for corporate partners and businesses that wanted to help and launched an email campaign to inspire more giving. Traffic skyrocketed, with CARE.org receiving 33 times higher than average traffic for hits, and about 15 times the normal traffic in terms of visits and sessions.
The effectiveness of the sites during the disaster was a big help, says Smith. “Clearly the added marketing and awareness and branding exposure is a benefit, as well the fact that we have been able to grow our email lists by about 35 percent and add many tens of thousands of new donors.”
And the process has been generally smooth, thanks in much part to CARE’s Web host, Irving, Texas-based Data Return. “To be honest with you, the only way we prepared was by having a partner that can handle that peak load and a set of servers that can handle the requests,” Smith says. “We didn’t have to do any kind of special planning or emergency shuffling to make the delivery of the site work for the Asia quake disaster. Data Return even got in touch with us about a script we were using on user entry that was causing trouble at the high volume levels and we deleted it.”
Data Return (datareturn.com) has been providing hosting services for CARE for more than a year. It found that the infrastructure designed and implemented before the tsunami was more than enough to handle the sudden impact of user traffic.
“Our network is designed around a low maximum utilization threshold that prevents unplanned heavy traffic from saturating the WAN and affecting performance,” says David Kramer, vice president of operations for Data Return. “Internal network infrastructure is built for performance and availability, using a dual-core design, gigabit Ethernet and fully-redundant switching fabric. Uptime goals for all Data Return data centers are 100 percent availability. Our on-demand computing services allow for rapid scalability when required. Our application-level transactional monitoring ensures that up’ really means up’ the application is performing the tasks required of it.”
CARE.org finds a proactive, customer-friendly posture on the part of a Web host to be a boost to the comfort factor. “They alert us immediately when there is a problem,” says Smith. “Data Return has always been good about this and it is crucial. They also turn their help desk ticket system around to their customers so that we can actually see everything that is being done to service any problems they let you see exactly what the tech reps over at Data Return are seeing and keying in. Hosting, at the end of the day, is a rather simple part of the entire equation it should work, after all. But you do notice it when something is awry.”
The flood of goodwill wasn’t simply guided by non-profit sites. Top e-commerce sites swung into action to help out. With the assistance of Missionfish.org, eBay set up its infrastructure so that buyers and sellers could contribute to various non-profits involved in relief via their transactions using PayPal. The auction site also set up a discussion board for the disaster and, swiftly, more than 1,000 threads were established, with hundreds of postings in some.
“Our users make for a very giving, involved community,” says Hani Durzy, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based eBay (ebay.com). “Whenever something like this happens, you’re going to see an outpouring of support from them. We haven’t seen a response like this since the attacks of September 11, 2001.”
While they were effective behind the scenes, Web hosting companies offered support out of their own pockets as well. On January 6, for example, Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Affinity Internet (affinity.com) announced that it would contribute $5 to the American Red Cross Tsunami Relief Fund for every new account established from the day of the announcement until the end of February 2005. The actual value of the contribution is expected to come in at about $50,000.
The giving has emerged in the form of technology sharing as well. Bloggers more often associated with hot-button political topics of the day went into full-reporting mode after the tsunami, posting pictures of missing persons as a public service, thanks to online enterprises such as Blogspot.com. Bloggers also began posting video from the region to share in a non-commercial access point with users. It was an immediate success, with nearly 400,000 requests for video served within the first day and a half that it was made available. But many bloggers encountered huge bandwidth bills from ISPs, charging more because of traffic spikes. As a result, in early January, the Media Bloggers Association called attention to the problem, and technology firms such as Boston-based content delivery provider Mirror Image (mirror-image.com) began offering free, ongoing use of its global network and related tech support for bloggers passing on valuable information about the disaster.
For Mirror Image, it was simply a matter of doing what it could at a time of great need. “We were approached for assistance and immediately said yes,’” says Jeffrey Schutzman, Mirror Image’s vice president of global sales and marketing. “When disasters happen, it’s important for companies to step up and offer support.”
And whether it was companies, news organizations, users or consumers, the Internet certainly succeeded in stepping up and offering its support, as a community and as a technology.
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