Which Website gets over 100 million Unique Visitors, 1 Billion Page Views a year?

California,
Nari Kannan

The NASA web site gets heavy traffic during events like the Mars Lander landing and it sending pictures from Mars subsequently. In 2004, during the last Mars landing, they got 60 million unique visitors, 50,000 simulatenous connections, 550 page views and 17.5 billion hits for the whole year! This year they expect all these statistics to double!

In olden days pictures and videos were first analyzed by scientists and then slowly released for public consumption. Today NASA IT people ensure that pictures and videos are available on their web site within 15 minutes of receiving them from MARS!

They use a Vignette Content Management system to receive pictures and create content around them and publish them for three sets of audiences - Public, Scientists and Museums in a controlled way!

In 2002 they had a single server in the basement just for announcements like "Press conference at 2 p.m". Now they use Sungard servers, had 330 TB of data in 2004 (expect it to be double now at least), hold 100 to 150 live viewings in musuems supported by their servers.

They incoporate many interesting web 2.0 companies like Twitter, Second Life, Yahoo (for streaming assistance), Google for their variety of offerings and technology!
Very interesting reading!

However, one thing striking about this article is that they don't have any 2008 statistics or even 2007 or even 2006!