What a dull, fiddly-diddly, tech-tastic day
Apart from a quick shimmy to the Brixton Lounge for an afternoon coffee, I’ve spent the entire day trying to sort out the tricky problem of finding a new host for the urban75 bulletin boards.
Sadly, the bulletin boards have become a victim of their own success, with traffic levels rising through the roof, stretching the generosity of our current hosts – and our server to breaking point.
(Tech facts:
The ‘server load’ on most 1&1 machines is around 0.5
A busy server would register 3.
A very busy server load would be 5
urban75.net was registering 92 today!)
Over the past four years, traffic has doubled every six months, with 4,000 new posts being created every day, and over 125,000 pages looked at every day, sending the (expensive) bandwidth requirements into the stratosphere.
A few weeks ago, I thought I could reduce the server load by stopping guests browsing the forums (i.e you had to register to read anything). Unfortunately, that cunning scheme backfired quite spectacularly, with over 1,000 new users registering in two weeks!
So now we’ve got nearly 8,500 registered users burning an even bigger hole in our bandwidth.
So I’ve got to find a new server in double quick time. Happily the urban75 massive has responded brilliantly, with lots of people pledging monthly donations to keep the boards afloat.
Tomorrow we’re holding the inaugural meeting of the Emergency Server Relocation Tech Team, wisely hosted in a pub so that reassuring beers are only an arms length away if the tech team talk gets too, err, techtastic.
I just want to sort the ruddy thing out because it’s hurting my head!
