TV Guide Online resulted from the merger of two former sites, Prevue Online and the TV Guide Entertainment Network. The job of the new site's staff was to build a Web presence that would complement TV Guide magazine and its broadcast counterpart, the TV Guide Channel.
In planning the site, TV Guide Online staff had to make a number of critical technology decisions that would affect the viability of the new project. Key criteria included the ability to provide continuous, transparent access for customers even when there was a technical problem with the site; the ability to scale quickly as the site grew in popularity; and enough flexibility to create personalized visits.
These features were on the requirement list because of the staff's experience with previous systems, including UNIX on the TV Guide Entertainment Network and Prevue Online's Windows NT Server farm, which employed round-robin DNS-based connection requests for user queries. UNIX would have been too expensive to deploy and administer for what was needed, Carr says, while the performance of the Windows NT Server DNS design was not conducive to failure recovery on a 24 X 7 site.
"When we looked at the requirements for launching the new site, we took a fresh look at the technology available that would provide us with better scalability and performance," Carr says. He says TV Guide Online was already committed to the Microsoft platform because of the previous positive experience with Windows NT Server and the development staff's familiarity with Microsoft development tools.
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