If you tried hitting LE this past weekend, you probably notice you weren’t able to. On Friday, my hosting service killed the connection due to the amount of resources I was using. What this means is that I either have a lot more lurkers than I thought I did or something was going on in the background. Jesse and I are thinking that the problem is a little bit of both. Not that having a lot of visitors is a problem, only when said resources can’t handle them.
So over the weekend we switched hosting services and took the opportunity to go to a virtual private server with Linode. This will give us a lot more control than we previously had and we’ll be able to see what is going on when things like this happen. As it is, we’re already planning on doing a few tests to see where the problem areas are and making any adjustments as needed. We’ve already begun to find areas of interest this morning when the site had a glitch (hence the reason it was down for a bit). So far, it seems like the design changed I implemented in August (aka the thumbnail images on the index page) is causing some problems – which is why they are gone already. Enough problems that the hubby is telling me that I need to come up with a new template for the site.
I’ve already been planning to do some tweaking with the sidebar, but now I’m going to begin the arduous task of giving LE a complete design overhaul. I’m not sure how much of a change I’m going to do, obviously the eye isn’t going anywhere, but I may play around with the colors a bit.
In either case, expect a few changes over the next month or so. I’ll tell you this right now, one of the major changes will be the appearance of paid advertisements in January (more details coming soon). LE needs to generate a little more income to offset the cost of the new hosting and the specialized attention to fix these issues. I promise, the ads will not overwhelm the site.
So that was this past weekend. There may still be some glitches over the next few days as we try and pinpoint/fix problems, but we’re working on them.
Ugh! What a frustrating weekend. :( Glad you’re up and running.
I had a lot of trouble for a while and nothing was obviously wrong – it turned out I was being spam cannoned. Implementing WP Super Cache took care of that. Oh, and I started doing periodic mysql database maintenance.
Good luck!
Thanks Sandy!
@Chris – yeah, the hubby found a spider had attacked my site – it hit LE 500+ times within 30 seconds. We’ve been watching it today since it was so slow yesterday and it seems to be stable again.
Glad you’re back up.