Election night post-mortem

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Nov. 5, 2008, 3:09 p.m.

We noted yesterday that Rich Miller had predicted trouble on election night for sites like FiveThirtyEight that hosted on free/cheap sites like Blogger. Well, score one for Rich — FiveThirtyEight was noticeably slower than its peers all night long, earning this rebuke from the site’s Sean Quinn:

One does wonder why Blogger’s owner Google, of all people, is consistently unable to handle large surges of traffic. It’s always so sad to see a news site’s servers struggle with the moments that should be their finest: when the whole world descends.

Also note that, as one might have predicted, last night broke the all-time record for most traffic to online news sites. The peak moment: Right at 11 p.m. EST, when the networks declared it for Obama.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Nov. 5, 2008, 3:09 p.m.

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