Do you have received through to healthcare.gov yet?

Happy day Obamacare!

I have secure health and change it casually, but thought it might today go to healthcare.gov and see what it would cost me a new change policy.  It didn't work as well, and (as my colleague Rachel King which has reported), that I am not alone.

Several times I went to the site and, as it is required to proceed, I have tried to create an account. Initial account creation process worked without problems (you have a complaint and some praise, see below), but after I have presented the request spun wheels for a couple of minutes and then this:

Four times I tried.

I live in New Jersey, who did not want to create a change of State, so the Federal Government operates one for us, as directed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), better known as Obamacare.

It is hardly a surprise that the site would be particularly busy today, so I reserve judgement on it (and the law itself,) and I still don't know what it will cost me. But I think that there is any reason to worry.

A person tried to compare it to the users of delays I experience download iOS 7 on the first day, but I don't think it's a good analogy. iOS 7 is a download of hundreds of megabytes, many of the users that were accessing through wireless networks. Bandwidth contention is completely predictable.

When I tried to create an account at healthcare.gov, I had problems to connect to the front-end web server. Knowing the login form it took awhile; I presented with this:

That delay took several minutes. It is not a particularly sophisticated system. The page contains this:

For those of you who do not write HTML, this means that reloads the page every 30 seconds.

Once I got through the login page, fill out the forms to create an account was smooth and quick. It is the background processing systems that could not handle the load. This may also be reasonable on day 1, but so far not is certainly no reason to be impressed with its transaction processing capabilities.

They are going to pay the price in support, but I admire the site designers to have quite strict username and password rules. Here they are:

The user name is case sensitive. Choose a user name that has a length of 6-74 characters and must contain one lowercase or uppercase, a number, or one of these symbols _. @/-

The password must contain between 8-20 characters. There must be at least 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase and 1 number. 6 Passwords must be different from its past. It cannot contain your user name, or any of these characters =?<> ( ) ‘ " / \ &

These are strict enough that many people are going to travel on them, but it is the right thing to do. Probably because they know that there will be problems, the site also requires you to choose 3 challenge questions and provides answers:

Personally, I have had problems with a third party that would be safe from. I prefer when places allow you to provide the question and answer, something very personal that only you would know and would never forget.

So, to be fair, it is too early to say if they did a good job on the part of this website. I hope that things are better tomorrow, or at least before open enrollment.