This has resulted in what's called fault tolerance at the application level. The February interruption was a separate, unique issue. A system change was put in that impacted the trading page only.'' Internet portal Yahoo Inc., of Santa Clara, another company bent on rapid expansion, has so far relied on using midrange servers. As traffic grows on Yahoo sites, Yahoo simply adds more machines, says President Jerry Yang. Adding computing power is, of course, only part of the equation.
People are another, crucial, element.
Major Web companies, with plenty of stock options available, have no trouble attracting technical talent. Wal-Mart, which has more than 3,000 stores in the United States, as well as hundreds elsewhere, has sued Amazon, claiming that recruiting away its technology talent constitutes theft of trade secrets. When eBay crashed, one of the complaints that disgruntled users aired in e-mails and postings is that the company is being run by people who have no clue about technology. But the company, which hosts auctions for more than 2 million items on a single, powerful server from Sun Microsystems of Palo Alto, has promised to add more engineers, review its software and hardware and speed up its plans for redundancy. And one of the disadvantages of the Web as a business medium is that there usually isn't a human buffer between the customer and an inexplicable, ornery piece of equipment.