Best of the ISP-Lists

We Need a Way to Provide the News

Members of the ISP-Webhosting list imagine many ways in which ISPs could help disseminate news during a crisis. All news sites, whether hosted by small or large companies, were overloaded with traffic during recent events.

[September 26, 2001]

On the ISP-Webhosting list in September, DW noted,

"News sites were flooded on the 11th. During tragic situations like this, people need to be informed, and as webhosting providers and ISPs, it's our obligation to keep information flowing. What do we need to do to be better prepared for this kind of situation?"

[MS agreed] "One of our clients is a news service, and their site experienced ten times normal traffic. It brought the server to a crawl, and we moved the site off to a separate server temporarily."

A number of respondents offered the most obvious solution:

[KA suggested] "Some sort of mirroring is what is needed. It is information people want: simply mirroring a central news agency (perhaps a government news agency) would be a good solution."

[MS added] "It would be nice to have some kind of backup mirror with simple DNS load balancing geographically networked for critical sites such as news sites. Of course, there would have to be mutual safeguards so no webhost could take advantage and use the mechanism to offload heavy sites during normal times. If we could establish a network of cooperating webhosts that would agree to act as DNS load balancers for each other on an exchange basis under extraordinary situations, that might work."

[AL agreed] "The most effective way seems to be a network of mirrors, or a round robin of various servers which could be distributed among different networks."

[CP advised] "This would require a cooperative effort between us and our upstream providers. We would need to set up a kind of global bridge from box to box with information cached, and in such a way to redirect when one box becomes overwhelmed. No small task, but not impossible."

Others offered practical advice on the specifics of the setup:

[OK noted] "This is what the FreeNet project is trying to do, but for different reasons. All the information is automatically duplicated across the server."

[MS added] "The news service, or whoever needs such a geographically mirrored service, would need to publish as many times as there are mirrors, and the ISP would not need to be heavily involved."

[DB recalled] "Most sites, when they came back up, were in light mode, without ads and graphics. The amount of traffic could be reduced merely by removing unnecessary graphics, and reduce the need for mirroring. It's a good point for designers to note."

—End