Weathering the Storm

Mark Ryan woke up early with Debby on his mind. Hurricane Debby, that is. How could he sleep when he had to tangle with such a menacing force of nature? The day before, the hurricane's turbulent 75 MPH winds had barely missed Puerto Rico, and forecasters had predicted that Debby would intensify as it lumbered closer to Florida. Despite living in Atlanta, well out of harm's way, Ryan nonetheless felt as if he were gazing out the window of his beachfront home at a line of ominously dark clouds approaching. After months of preparation, he hoped that he was ready. His Web site would get hit -- and hit hard.

Ryan, 39, is chief technology officer for weather.com, the online arm of the Weather Channel. Even at less-eventful moments, when the weather is not making headlines, the site generates heavy traffic -- between 7 million and 10 million page views per day. During hurricane season, that number multiplies, often dramatically, depending on the severity and the path of the storm. At times, those spikes have overwhelmed the network, causing weather.com to become the one thing that Ryan wants to avoid: a slow site.

So earlier this year, Ryan's team of architects and engineers tossed out weather.com's existing infrastructure and completely rebuilt it. Despite finishing the massive, multimillion-dollar project just in time for hurricane season, no one on Ryan's team was confident or relaxed. How could they be? Forecasters had predicted a more active season than usual -- as many as 7 hurricanes and 11 tropical storms -- and Ryan still didn't know if weather.com could handle the severe jump in traffic. There was no way to simulate a spike of that magnitude. In other words, there was no way to know for sure -- until an actual storm showed up on the doorstep of Florida, South Carolina, or North Carolina.

Enter Hurricane Debby. At 6 AM, Ryan logged on to his computer from home to check the network. It was hard to believe he wasn't dreaming. The rebuilt infrastructure had handled nearly 15 million page views the previous day without missing a beat. The average response time to download a page was about normal: just 1.7 seconds. That was well below the accepted industry threshold of 8 seconds -- and more than twice as fast as the Business Top 40, the standard used by the company that monitors weather.com's speed.

As Hurricane Debby fizzled out that day, and weather.com's traffic returned to normal, Ryan exulted in the performance of his team and his site, congratulating team leaders and posting the impressive statistics on the door of the CEO's office. Granted, it was only one test -- and only one very good day in August -- but the numbers told Ryan and the rest of the weather.com staff what they needed to know: Weather.com was on solid ground. Twenty-million page views in one day? No problem. Thirty million? Bring 'em on.

These days, the forecast for most Web-based companies, and for the Internet economy in general, is "stormy weather ahead." Blue-sky strategic thinking has given way to batten-down-the-hatches battles for survival, against the gale-force winds of investor disgust, venture-capital confusion, and big-company backlash. Like houses destroyed by the random cruelty of a twister, Internet startups that once appeared promising are being reduced to nothing. Who would have thought, amid the rubble of laid-off employees, worthless stock options, and abandoned foosball tables, that one of the Web sites still standing would be rooted in the weather?

Weather.com hasn't just survived -- it has become an online service with a loyal following that keeps growing. It is not just the top weather-related site but is one of the top sites on the entire Web. In July, for instance, which is traditionally an uneventful month weather-wise, 7.4 million individual users visited weather.com, which placed the Weather Channel 33rd on Media Metrix's list of Web domains, many of which pool their audience from multiple sites. Another 4 million to 5 million users accessed weather.com's customized service on AOL, the company's biggest partner. In all, that's around 12 million people who got information from weather.com.

By nearly any measure, the 5-year-old business is "growing like a weed," as Debora Wilson, weather.com's president and CEO, puts it. Weather.com's staff has grown from 3 employees in the early days to more than 150 employees this year. Its annual revenue is more than doubling, which puts the site on pace to turn a profit next year, in keeping with its five-year plan. And the number of page views is expected to double by year's end to around 3 billion, in part because of more than 200,000 weather.com affiliates. Every day, around 800 new Web companies drag and drop the Weather Channel's sky-blue logo to their own site, instantly adding features such as find-a-forecast at no charge.