When you speak we listen...
Today, I spent a good bit of time on the phone with several people (rather than on line), analyzing our servers and traffic patterns. Not satisfied with the explanations that I was getting, I trotted on down to the data center and talked with two of their senior engineers. What we (and they) thought was more than enough bandwidth for ten forums, is not quite enough at peak, peak times. In addition to those peaks, we identified a number of additional areas we need to address in our server management. Nothing overly critical, but when added all together they seem to make us a lot slower than the servers we are running on should give us.
So, we have quadrupled our bandwidth so we can see just how much we are actually peaking at, and we have ordered yet one more server to accommodate all of our traffic. While we are enjoying the extra bandwidth right now, the rest will take us a couple of weeks to implement.
There are many, many forums out there who wish they were consuming our bandwidth. It's the price of being popular and of our increasing popularity worldwide. How did we do it? We did it by listening to YOU, our users and by giving YOU what you want to the best of our ability. Thanks for your loyalty and bringing this to our attention. You can be sure that I will not rest until we have EVERYTHING running just right. BTW, look for a new look in the not too distant future with a number of intriguing features coming in the next six months.
