There, I said it.
While the issues with Healthcare.gov are more of an issue because people's health and lives are at stake, the problems and challenges that they're facing are by no means unique to a government website. Video games, for example, are notorious for having rough first months. (The two most recent examples being Grand Theft Auto V Online and Final Fantasy XIV ARR.) The history of the Internet, especially Software as a Service (SaaS) websites and services, are littered with buggy rollouts.
Since we've been doing it for "so long" (fifteen years now? time moves differently in Internet years), why can't we seem to get it right?
At its core, the Internet is made of two things: Words and numbers. The words and numbers are spliced and diced into little bundles called packets, and shuffled off through copper wires to be unpackaged by other computers and viewed as images and words again. This particular miracle of engineering has been taken for granted since the days of ARPANET, but it wasn't until hypertext and the World Wide Web that we really started expecting it all to magically work.
A modern web page is more than just a page. It's a work of art, a blend of human and computer wizardry, and has an intricate layer of programming interwoven into its very fabric. The guts of a major website like Daily Kos is a database, with dozens of calls on any given page to display unique data for the viewer.
A criticism floating around is that hitting the "Apply" button on Healthcare.gov calls on 57 separate Java script functions. Big whoop. Did you know that the Amazon home page calls on over 100 different units without you even hitting any buttons? That's just to load it and present it to you, the viewer. I'm not saying that the Healthcare.gov website is a paragon of optimization - gosh no, it definitely needs a ton of work - but the number of database calls any given website makes means nothing in regards to its efficiency or speed. Those word and number packets fly at the speed of light, after all.
What tends to gum up major website rollouts is that the back end architecture doesn't scale properly. A database server is just a big computer with a great deal of RAM and storage space and processing power. Its sole purpose in life is to get requests from people viewing web pages and shuffle the appropriate information back to them.
Another problem in large scale web architectures can be the data center itself. Most data centers are built close to the industrial grade Internet connections that bind the world together, known as the "backbones." But the connection between the backbone and the data center itself can be significantly weaker, and the connection between the data center's network infrastructure and the individual servers can be even weaker still. The sheer number of requests that hammer a web server on the first day can be enough to make the server go "Nope, ain't gonna" and lock up - assuming the traffic even gets to it from the backbone.
Google, Amazon, and the other giant web companies have found creative ways around this problem, with replicated virtual servers in the cloud located across the country - and even the world - that can spin up and spin down whenever needed to match demand. Setting up that kind of architecture is inexpensive but tricky, and with Healthcare.gov and all the HIPPA data that was going to be stored, Amazon Web Services or any of the other offerings out there were probably not an option for security reasons.
So the web's regular method of handling large scale websites isn't available. We're dealing with an unknown amount of demand (that turned out to be crushingly high, which is good for America but bad for the web servers) and so those designing the architecture of the data center had to go with a best guess estimate and hope for the best. They were unfortunately wrong in their estimates, as so many web services are these days.
Don't blame the Healthcare.gov team - they're in good company, and they're not even getting paid as much as Rockstar did for GTA V, in the end. (It's made over a billion dollars.)
Catwho is an IT Analyst and has a degree in Internet Technology from the University of Georgia.