Barely 24 hours after the launching of the Cross River State Civil Service job portal, http://crscsc.ng, the website for employment into the Commission has gone offline.
CONVERSEER gathered that Cross Riverians have been unable to access the website in order to apply for the 17 job positions as announced by the Chairman of the Commission, Sir Maurice Effiwatt, on Monday.
Shortly after the site was launched, it went offline; it has been more than 48 hours and it is yet to be accessible.
When our Reporter visited the website on Tuesday, 20th August 2024, to confirm if what the people were saying was true, the site was not loading and showing the following errors.
“Resource Limit Is Reached: The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.”
Another visit to the Cross River State Civil Service job website on Wednesday morning, 21st August 2024, displayed another error as follows:
“The connection to crscsc.ng is not secure: You are seeing this warning because this site does not support HTTPS.”
When our Reporter clicked further, the following error message appeared after waiting for several minutes.
“Service Unavailable: The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
“Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
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Speaking to the CONVERSEER regarding the error messages, a Web developer, Frank Ulom, said there are several reasons why the website is not accessible, and the major reasons are cheap hosting and resource distribution.
“I understand the situation with the Cross River State Civil Service job portal, and there are several reasons for that. Let’s look at the first error, ‘Resource Limit Is Reached’ – this is due to cheap hosting. Many websites in Nigeria are not being managed by the owners, even government websites because of our poor electricity and Internet connectivity. Even so, the website hosting companies in Nigeria do reseller hosting, that is, buy from overseas and resell to cut costs.
“For the resource limit error, it means they bought a cheap hosting for between N50,000 to N100,000, which cannot withstand the traffic for a job portal that hundreds of thousands or millions of people will be visiting simultaneously. And, you can not use ‘Shared Hosting’ servers on such a site. You need, at least, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or, more advisably, a Dedicated Server with lots of resources to handle such requests,” he said.
Ulom added “For the second error, which is the HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), it is either an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), an encryption-based Internet security protocol, is not installed or properly configured. Such errors can also be encountered if there is no proper redirection from the non-secured HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to the secured HTTPS.
“For the third error, ‘503 Service Unavailable error,’ there are many causes to this error. One, the developer used a CMS (Content Management System) to build the website. CMS like WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Joomla, Wix, Shopify, etc, may be easy to use, but misconfiguration or fewer resources will always lead to errors, causing the website to be inaccessible. Even though CMS is easier to use to build a website since it offers drag-and-drop (codeless) services, it is not advisable to use for a website with less allocation of resources or, simply put, ‘Cheap Hosting.’
“Another issue I noticed which you didn’t ask about is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), that is, the website link (crscsc.ng) – for a government-owned website, it is supposed to have a .gov or .gov.ng domain, at least. What I mean is that the Web link for the job portal was supposed to be crscsc.gov or crscsc.gov.ng. This shows authority and authenticity.
“In all, everything depends on the budget and the hands employed to do the job. I wonder how much they must have budgeted for the website. So, for the website to work, all I’ve mentioned needs to be put into consideration.”
CONVERSEER reports that Governor Bassey Otu approved the employment of 2,000 eligible youths between the ages of 18 and 45 into the State Civil Service.
CLICK HERE to visit the job application portal.
