Popularity of European culture not anticipated
Or so it seems. From the Europeana dev website:
We launched the European.eu [sic] site on 20 November and huge use – 10 million hits an hour – meant it crashed. We are doing our best to reopen Europeana.eu in a more robust version. Meanwhile, the site you’re in now is the project development site, with a video to give you a tasts [sic] of what’s on the real Europeana site. Unfortunately this project site is only in English: the real Europeana is in all EU languages.
I’m not usually one to gloat on the failure of others, but I do think that this is pretty embarrassing. The first digital library of European art and culture opens its doors and… goes off-line for a full month? Yes, the amount of traffic is significant, but surely a scalable architecture of some sort was used that should have been able to shoulder this.
Or, perhaps the solution is to put Europeana on a cloud. But that would mean dealing with companies like Google or Amazon who maintain clouds – or maybe to launch a central European data center than provides hosting to projects like this.