When President Obama took office he promised greater transparency in government. The technology behind this promise was supposed to be the web, but this demands that the government become competent at hosting high traffic web sites.
Car dealers have been trying to register for since early this morning with no success. Many have been unsuccessful given the sheer volume of traffic being directed to the NHTSA website. Slow response times and error pages are all most dealers have received so far.  The registration pile-up seemed to ease a bit later in the day as some dealer registration Tweets were sent in to us. (via CashForClunkersFacts.com)
As government moves onto the internet they are going to have to become more more savvy when it comes to rolling out such services. Since Cash For Clunkers was not open to the public it should have been a relatively simple matter to predict the amount of traffic it would receive. There are only a fixed number of dealers in the country, so the traffic spike wasn’t nearly as bad as being Slashdotted.
Going forward let’s hope that somone learns from this experience and begins to do proper testing of government sites.
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