HHS knew HealthCare.gov would malfunction with only 1,100 users on the site

If you're not in the business of running web sites, maybe you don't have a full perspective on the type of audience 1,100 represents. Let me give you an idea: HermanCain.com, which you are on right now, has handled 1,100 concurrent visitors or more with no problem for most of today. We've handled three times that much on our highest traffic days, and when we did, our excellent web company DynamiX had to put some additional servers to work, but it was no big deal.

We're doing about 1.5 million unique visitors per month right now. We're pretty happy with that, although it's far from our goal. But let's keep it in perspective. We're the web site of a one-time presidential candidate and current syndicated radio host. That's nothing to sneeze at, but we are not the web site that is supposed to serve as the means by which an entire nation of people buy health insurance in a matter of months. Now one thing I think Fox News got a little mixed up in the story I'll excerpt here is that in one spot they say HealthCare.gov was only able to handle 1,100 visits per day. But elsewhere it says 1,100 concurrent users. Those two are not the same. Concurrent means on the site at any given time, and I suspect that's what the quoted memo really means. And just to be clear, given the scope and mission of a web site like this, that is not going to cut it by a long shot.

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Fox:

The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that the website’s repeated crashes were due to unexpectedly high traffic. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said on Oct. 6 that the website was expected to draw around 60,000 simultaneous users but instead drew many more, around 250,000. However,a Healthcare.gov testing bulletin from Sept. 30, the day before the site’s launch, states that the website began to run into trouble with far fewer users. “Currently we are able to reach 1,100 users before response time gets too high," the bulletin states. The bulletin says that the goal moving forward was to “conduct more thorough testing with (the Federally Facilitated Marketplace) to reach targets of up to 10,000 concurrent users in the next few days."

That's their target? A mere 10,000 concurrent users? And they're supposed to have this thing fully operational by the end of November? Good night. That panic going on among Democrats is going to get a lot more intense, and a lot more fun to make popcorn and watch.