De Standaard: down by popular demand

De Standaard is one of the better (Flemish) newspapers in Belgium, and the pioneer of building an excellent web site around a “traditional” medium (even making money from it). That is why it is so surprising that after all these years, they still haven’t figured out how to handle traffic peaks. Nor how to customize web server error messages.

They must have posted something really interesting again this morning (“Nieuw theoretisch rijexamen verrast“? “Belgen bouwen in China“? I can see these thanks to krantenkoppen.be) because their site is unavailable:

“The request cannot be processed at this time. The amount of traffic exceeds the Web site’s configured capacity.”

Three remarks on that:

The Standaard Blog on the other hand is hosted on Typepad, and they sure use caches (look for “<a href="http://www.forret.com/projects/analyze/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstandaard.typepad.com%2Fen_nu_even_ernstig%2F">X-Cache = HIT/MISS from www.sixapart.com</a>“).

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💬 Belgium 💬 internet