Our story so far..

JoeUser.com started out as my personal blog site. Like most blog sites, it only received a handful of visitors per day.  One day, I decided it would be fun to turn it into a blog community.

And to that end, the world class Stardock IT team put together an incredibly sophisticated set of technologies to help create the world's first "blogging community". Each user would have their own set of point, all articles would have points, blogs would have scoring. There'd be per user lists of sites they could respond on, audience control, etc.

And all was fine...for awhile. But as the site picked up on popularity, having it all on a single machine slowly made things slower..and slower..and slower.. 

As I type this article, there are 497 people on JoeUser.com at the same time.  Which is nothing compared to WinCustomize.com.  But because Joeuser.com is a free site, it doesn't get a lot of IT time or hardware dedicated to it.

Not that it mattered -- our existing colo that houses the server for JU couldn't have any more machines. This eventually became a problem as JU had to share a database server with WinCustomize.com.  Since WinCustomize.com is related to Stardock's business, it receives priority access to the database.

But over the weekend and until today, we migrated the machines to a new colo fascility where we were able to install many more servers.  Now, that means nothing at present, JU is still on the same old over-burderned hardware.

But it does mean that there are now other computers that JoeUser.com can be distributed to.  So the limitation is no longer a lack of available hardware resources but mrely time to distribute the load between the machines and clean up the database stuff (and then fix bugs).  You can kind of see the speed of the future if you use the forums which use some of the newer code.  Eventually that kind of code will be used throughout and with the hardware distribution, the site should become fast.

The IT guys tell me it'll take about two months for this to be completed. But hopefully during that time you'll start to see some parts speed up.