Website Performance Roundup: All seems well this morning except Hawaii... (FIXED)
I spent a few minutes this morning poking around all 15 ACA exchange websites (HC.gov plus the 14 state-run websites). Obviously I didn't go through and actually create an account or enroll/renew in any of them (although my wife and I did renew our own coverage via HC.gov on Saturday, and everything went fine). However, I at least visited all of the sites and clicked through as far as I could go without actually setting any accounts up.
For the most part, everything went smoothly. Yes, some of the sites have more confusing layouts/navigation than others, but my main concern was whether they load at all, how quickly pages load, whether any glitches or broken links pop up and so on.
I only ran into two issues: The Rhode Island site failed to load the first time but loaded quickly when I refreshed. I did find a larger issue on the Hawaii Health Connector site, however. If you visit the main page, then click "Get Insured" at the top, you're taken here. From there, you're presented with 4 big buttons: Two for individuals/families and two for small businesses. If you click the first link ("Insurance with Help Paying"), which a good 85% or so of enrollees will be using, it links to "Medical.MyBenefits.Hawaii.Gov"...
...except that it's either a bad link or the server it goes to is down:
Error 404--Not Found
From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:
10.4.5 404 Not FoundThe server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.
If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.
I don't know if this link has been broken all along or if it's something new due to today's traffic spike, but it's kind of a big deal, I would think. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this is the correct link, but I could be wrong.
Anyway, the folks at the HI exchange might want to get on top of this...
UPDATE: Looks like it's fixed now; thanks to contributor Robert for the tip...