Here I'll post some ramblings and generally incoherent stuff about what we're doing with the site.
First, it was down for nearly 48 hours. Why? Our ip addresses changed and our provider neglected to tell us. Oops! We've had ip changes in the past without incident, normally we get the new ips, add them to the box with the old ips (so both sets of ip addresses are working simultaneously), and once the old ips are invalid, we've been up and running on the new ips for about a week. Didn't happen this time. Plus it took forever to get someone to physically go to the server and punch in the new ip addresses (since the old were non-functional, we could not do this remotely). Needless to say we're not happy, and are taking actions to make sure this doesn't happen again. Such as:
We're getting a second server! It'll be a dual opteron 246 with 2GB ram, and a 73GB SCSI drive. Should be plenty of horsepower for at least a little while. Whether we keep the current server as-is for backup/redundancy, or upgrade it too, we'll figure out later. This should greatly increase site speed, and will be able to handle the sudden jump in visitors in the next few months due to:
Our Black Friday site is up for the new 2006 sales! Ok, there's no ads yet, but we're ready for them, and have some new features in store for you! We already have a section dedicated on our forum just for Black Friday, and we're getting a bigger and better server to handle the increase in traffic (we've been planning on the new server for months, but just recently decided to add it in addition to the current one, instead of just replacing it). The current server has been straining a bit to keep up with the ever-increasing traffic, and we knew that the Black Friday traffic would put a serious hurt on it (traffic in general keeps increasing, but there's always a sudden spike in traffic around the holidays due to us giving you no-nonsense access to the Black Friday ads, no hoops to jump through, no having to register, just hop on and enjoy!).
As always, we have many things planned for the site in various stages of implementation, and if you have a suggestion for something that would improve the site we'd love to hear it!
