A Sunny Commune - Cheng's Blog

Merry Christmas but sorry, no webkinz

Important statement about the content of this post:

I've been informed that Ganz is in fact taking every step possible to ensure they provide their community with an infrastructure that will support the heaviest loads. Sun is in fact working with Ganz to provision this infrastructure, but due to a number of complex reasons the teams were not able to complete the migration prior to the Christmas rush. 

This post is strictly my personal views and does not represent that of my employer or coworkers.  I had underestimated the complexity of managing such a large site.  Some conclusions in this post are premature based on incorrect facts.  My sincere apologies for any hard feelings and hindrance it has caused to webkinz/panther team during this holiday season.  Thank you very much for bringing us this fascinating gift and see you soon at webkinz world. 

Sincerely,

Cheng Fang
 

So today is the Christmas day, a moment kids have been waiting all year long.  After getting a Chihuahua webkinz from Santa this morning, my daughter wasted no time trying to log onto webkinz  to play.  But like millions of kids around the world, she was greeted with this gloomy message on webkinz homepage:

Out of curiosity, I wanted to know what kind of server webkinz is on.  This is what netcraft has to say about this site: 

 Apparently, webkinz team has been working very hard to accommodate the potential load, upgrading web server a couple of  times within the last 2 months.  Their hosts are running various version of PWS.

 What kind of web server is PWS?  I've never heard of it.  After some search, I found out this definition on webopedia:

(2) When capitalized as Personal Web Server, the name of Microsoft’s Web server program for individuals hosting Web page files from a personal computer. Personal Web Server is a smaller-scale version of Microsoft’s IIS technology and is therefore limited in its capabilities. It is designed to support Web sites that obtain limited traffic and/or to be used as a staging server for building pages that will be transferred to a server that can handle large amounts of traffic.

 Bold font are by me for emphasis.  What a surprise and what a disappointment!  A crippled version of IIS.  (Note: This is in fact incorrect.  Please see Jason's comments below about webkinz's network infrastructure.)  That's what is powering the site that attracts millions of kids and parents around the globe.  For millions of webkinzs Santa gave out last night, they can't really be played online.  Then they are just a plain plush toy that is not even worth half the price.  Sorry, Santa, I know it's not your fault, but can I exchange it for a walking doodle?

Seriously, the infrastructure of webkinz site is underdeveloped no matter how hard you upgrade or patch it.  Here is a message to webkinz team, on behalf of my daughter, get some real hardware, now.  Sun servers are quite affordable these days.  For less than the price of 80 webkinzs (80*14.99=$1199.2), you can get a Sun Fire X2100 M2 server, two-way x64, high performance, and energy efficient, and free 60-day trial.

In addition, get the real OS, free.  Get the real application/web server, be it Apache, Sun web server, or Glassfish.

Some of these may already on your wish list, and hopefully Santa already delivered some last night.  But if Santa leaves a PWS/IIS under the Christmas tree, keep it for personal use.

Posted at 12:39PM Dec 25, 2007 by chengfang in Glassfish  |  Comments[37]