The African Democratic Congress (ADC) website recently experienced a temporary outage following an overwhelming surge in traffic just days after its official relaunch as a new coalition party. Users attempting to register reported error messages, most notably “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded,” which typically indicates that a website has surpassed its monthly data transfer limit. While the incident drew public attention and some skepticism online, the reality behind the crash was far more technical and rooted in unexpected success.

The website, developed and maintained by the Digital Oxygen Hub’s tech team, was launched on May 26, 2025, using a hosting plan that provided 60GB of bandwidth—sufficient for approximately 999,999 user sessions per month. This estimate was not made arbitrarily. It was based on historical data from ADC's previous digital infrastructure, where membership never exceeded 20,000 users. The team, following best practices, chose a modest hosting configuration to avoid overspending on bandwidth during what was intended to be a soft rollout or test phase. The magnitude of the traffic surge, however, far exceeded all expectations and historical patterns.

As registrations flooded in, the development team quickly scaled up the hosting plan, first to 150GB and then to 250GB of bandwidth. Eventually, the website was migrated to a metered hosting plan under Namecheap’s Fair Usage Policy to provide more flexibility. Despite initial upgrades, performance issues persisted due to the overwhelming volume of simultaneous user activities. Beyond delayed email confirmations, users were actively registering, paying membership dues, requesting physical and digital membership cards, and downloading digital IDs—all of which placed heavy demand on server resources. Additionally, the platform handled event registrations for political meetings and high engagement in the discussion forum, where users posted and interacted in real time. These combined workloads—spanning transactions, file generation, database operations, and backend triggers—quickly saturated the hosting environment, exceeding bandwidth and processing limits and ultimately pushing the system beyond what it was initially designed to handle. The existing server infrastructure limited outbound email delivery to just 60 messages per hour, yet the site was handling over 60 new registrations per hour—causing delays and failures in user verification.

As of 2:00 am, July 5, the ADC website has been fully restored and is currently operational. The development team has implemented temporary optimizations to stabilize the site and continues to monitor its performance. To ensure long-term reliability and prepare for even greater user volumes, Digital Oxygen has recommended a migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), particularly using Amazon EC2 for elastic, scalable hosting and Amazon SES for high-volume email delivery. These services offer dynamic resource scaling, granular control over performance, robust security for political data, and a pay-as-you-go model that aligns with budget constraints.

To strengthen the architecture further, the team suggests adding Amazon CloudFront for faster content delivery and DDoS protection, Elastic Load Balancer for distributing incoming traffic, and Auto Scaling Groups to dynamically adjust server capacity based on real-time demand. For database management, Amazon RDS or Aurora is recommended to replace manually managed databases and provide higher performance and reliability. Additionally, services like Postmark or SendGrid may be integrated alongside SES to improve email deliverability and provide detailed analytics. For the long term, the possibility of migrating certain functions to a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda is also under consideration, particularly for microservices like registration or OTP handling.

In summary, the ADC website's temporary downtime was not a result of poor planning, but rather the unexpected consequence of overwhelming public engagement. The Digital Oxygen team responded quickly and has laid out a clear, cost-effective roadmap to scale the platform using modern cloud infrastructure. With these upgrades, the ADC digital platform will be fully equipped to support millions of users efficiently, securely, and reliably in the build-up to the 2027 general elections.

By Amadi Obinna Martin
Senior Associate, Digital Oxygen Hub Limited
Software Engineer | AI Expert | Data Analyst