Hope crushes Obama's servers for several hours

For at least 4 hours, Barack Obama's campaign Web site has displayed that image above. His Web site is down, servers overloaded just mere hours before the polls open for Super Duper Fat Tuesday tomorrow.

It didn't come online fully until about midnight on Monday evening.

While some might see this as a good sign for Obama -- high interest means that lots of people like him, which translates to votes -- I think this is an example of how not to create a campaign Web site.

If you don't have the server capacity, the proper software that can't provide scalability and no back-up plan for high web traffic volume, then you're going to fall flat on your face.

The site's administrators should have predicted this was going to happen. They should have not just a back-up server to help share the increased load, but also implemented a trimmed down version of the site to help reduce the amount of bandwidth they'd chew through.

On any other day, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but we're talking the night before the biggest primary day. This is when undecided voters are doing their research on Google. This is when supporters are e-mailing, blogging, etc. to their friends and family to go learn more about the candidate. Meanwhile, your biggest communication tool isn't operational at all and your rival's site is working.

There's been plenty of campaign blunders, but there's a whole new host of them that'll crop up now that the Internet's playing such a tremendous role in political communications. If things go badly for Obama tomorrow, there's a good chance you'll see this as a case study in an online communications preparations textbook.

(Cross posted to Nerdlusus)