The new Heathcare.gov provides an interesting case study in doing successful(or not) high volume web sites. I happen to support the law, but the launch of the online exchanges is unfortunately a dismal failure. My company builds high volume sites, eg we got a call from a client that their products were to be featured on Oprahs Favorite Things and they expected 250,000 simultaneous users. We ramped it up in less than a week to handle over a million and had hardly a hiccup.
So I was interested to see how Healthcare.gov would handle the inevitable rush on Tuesday. I tried getting in several times the first day and got the friendly ‘Wait’ screen. That’s Ok but the wait may be interminable. I finally got in later on Day 1, filled in my info on 2 screens and got an Error Screen(shown) and Try Again. Tried again – same error.
Now it’s 2 Days later and I still can’t get in. I’ve heard claims that they had anywhere between 2 million and 10 million visitors on Day 1. So what? How many visitors do you think Amazon or Google get in a day?
So it’s ashame because the people who really need the program or may visit one of the thousands of Govt ‘Navigators’ will get frustrated. This is more of a PR Nightmare than the Media is reporting so far. If they don’t fix it soon, it may undermine a great program permanently.
If you or someone you know needs help with high-volume Ecommerce, let me know. We know how to make it work.
PathFinder Consulting 
Here’s a brief update to the Healthcare.gov story. It’s one week later and I was able to register. It went pretty smoothly. But then when I tried to actually Login twice, I got “Not Found -The requested URL /serverdown.html was not found.” Not good still. Funny, Joe in IT was able to do what the Republicans could not: shutdown Obamacare.