Shouldn’t they expect to be getting high traffic to their website?
Isn’t that a given, and so the next question would be, what could be done to fix the issue that seems to be very high traffic which is causing very slow load times?
It’s not really a high-tech site, just really a basic, simple layout look. You would think something like that would load up super fast all the time.
Right now seems to be fine, but 15 mins ago it was very slow loading.
I spoke too soon, it’s slow again.
Other than the standard page optimization techniques (reduced image size, reduced/optimized number of HTTP request/JS calls, etc), there’s not really any magic fix someone can do to magically make a site less suscepitable to high traffic spikes short of having an overly beefy server/network setup for the site, and there comes a balance which needs to be made - is it worth paying 20-25% more for traffic spikes which may only happen 1-2% of the time.
It is fair to assume that they have had particularly high level of traffic recently due to the recent exceptional weather events.
But possibly, 99% of the time their traffic is not so high, or not beyond what their servers can easily handle.
So can they justify the expense of more/faster servers to handle larger amounts of traffic just for the 1% of the time when they get a exceptionally high level of traffic?
I have been looking at it recently to check on Hurricane Harvey. Now Hurricane Irma is in the news and might cross over North Carolina on Tuesday. Hurricane Jose was headed for North Carolina but hopefully it will stay away from the coast and Bermuda. I have relatives in North Carolina.
That site is getting much more use than it usually does. You have said nothing about it crashing and if it is just slow but works eventually then that is good. Note that it is a government website. Big business does not like the government competing with them and many years ago lobbyists for big business have gotten laws passed limiting how much the government can do that might compete with businesses. So if you want better information you might have to pay for it instead of getting it for free from the government. Our government probably could do better technically but they can’t legally.