Topping 6 million hits on election day, www.jamaica-elections.com was enjoying growth of a kind comparable to the number of hits that Go-Jamaica's home page, arguably the most popular website in the Caribbean, gets in one week. Between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on election night the site logged more than 3 million hits.

Go-Jamaica, the on-line division of the Gleaner Company launched the election website on September 23, the day after Prime Minister P.J. Paterson announced election would be on October 16.

With the expectation of such high traffic from information-hungry Jamaicans locally and overseas, the Go-Jamaica team took the bold step from early on, of moving the Jamaica election website from a shared server to a dedicated server. This means that the website's capacity to handle the anticipated traffic was greatly enhanced. Within two hours of counting the ballots, the site was eating 99% of its capacity, giving the Go-Jamaica Webmaster no choice but to switch to plan B - a stripped-down version of the site. This means that fancy graphics which normally reduces the loading speed of the website, had to go. No worries. Roland Booth, designer and webmaster of www.jamaica-elections.com was quick at hand and in no time changed over to his text only version.

"We anticipated this huge traffic because a large number of Jamaicans are overseas and from the statistics that we had seen in our recent monthly reports, we knew just what to expect. So we had our stripped-down version ready". But not even Roland's brilliant idea was enough to manage the heavy flow. All systems flashed red and the traffic came to a standstill with many users being unable to log-on. It was not until after a few lengthy delays that the www.jamaica-elections.com highway was freed up, due perhaps to a few users simply logging off.

But the team managed it well and brought fast, accurate coverage of Election 2002 to people all over the world.

The website, fed by Gleaner's newsroom carried up-to-the-minute bulletins and breaking news stories. The Gleaner teamed up with Power 106 Radio and the result was a dynamic news centre from which information was fed fast and furious to the listening and viewing (website) audience. People who logged on to the website could also listen to live broadcasts from Power 106 Radio on www. jamaica-elections.com throughout election day and night as the website carried live streams which allowed over 150 people to log on and listen simultaneously to clear high quality broadcast. Chris Dehring's Financial Network also streamed the results from the site on the cable network.

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