$50,000 South Dundas website didn't deliver election results

If you were one of the hundreds of people trying to access www.southdundas.com to receive results on election night, you may have received a message saying the website was temporarily unavailable, or you may have seen nothing at all—and it wasn't your Internet connection.

The Municipality of South Dundas web site, located at www.southdundas.com, was unavailable for about an hour, beginning shortly after 8 p.m. During this time, users looking for Municipal election results received Error 500 or Resource Limited Reached messages—or the website simply did not respond at all.

Error 500 or Resource Limited Reached is common when a website receives too many requests from visitors, such as on election night, when residents are looking for election results.

Earlier in the day, residents had been told results of the election would be posted to the Municipal website, and to social media accounts when they became available after 8 p.m.

In an update to social media shortly after 8:30 p.m., the Municipality of South Dundas announced their site was experiencing a high volume of users, and that staff were working to resolve the issue.

By 9 p.m., the site was loading and election results had been posted.

SouthDundas.com is a popular website for residents to access local information and events. The site, re-launched in February 2018 was designed by Sarnia-Lambton area company RedChair Web Design.

"One of the main objectives of the new website was to make information easily accessible," said Katherine Wells, Communications & Tourism Coordinator for the Municipality of South Dundas, in a February 7th, 2018 media-release announcing the re-launched website.

Highlights of the new website included:

The new website incorporates a lot of key components from the previous site, including a news section, economic profile and a mobile-friendly design for smartphones and tablets.

In February, the release helped sell the upgraded website as a "go-to-place" for voter information.

SouthDundas.com is hosted by OVH Canada, a Montreal area Internet Service Provider which leases servers to web designers and smaller web hosting companies, who then resell those resources to their customers—sometimes placing hundreds or thousands of websites on the same server. This process is known as shared hosting, which is a great way for small businesses to start-up and save on hosting costs when they don't expect a lot of simultaneous users on their site.

Good shared hosting companies can usually handle a maximum of 40-50 concurrent user connections, depending on the type of website and how well it has been designed.

Larger sites with a lot of visitors and concurrent users, such as Nation Valley News, use Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Dedicated Servers, which allow the site to handle hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors simultaneously.

While shared hosting can cost as little as $50 per year, moving to a VPS or dedicated server can easily bump the yearly price tag to over $1,000.

A source close to the website re-design project tells The Morrisburg News that although $50,000 was budgeted for the new site, it's not clear how much was actually spent on its design and hosting.

SouthDundas.com uses a content management system called Wordpress, a popular free and open-source software that anyone can use.

Portions of the site, such as Online Services and "My Tax Account", which allow residents to manage their property taxes online, are managed by IT Services at SD&G Counties and a third-party software vendor.

The South Dundas website had been previously redesigned in 2010. Some minor aesthetic changes were later made in 2014.

In 2016, an outside group of reviewers from Gananoque found the Municipal site to be "user-friendly" during a First Impressions Community Exchange.