I am pleased to be able to tell you that Lingopolo has successfully moved home. Well, successfully moved to a new, and hopefully better web host.
I normally don't write in this blog about the behind-the-scenes technical side of Lingopolo, because I prefer to focus on the things which are new and on improved functionality or content. In this case I will make an exception, because it does have an important bearing on Lingopolo: the reliability of the website.
As background, you may know that Lingopolo only started life in October 2012. However, the number of visitors to Lingopolo has rapidly gone up and up. March 2013 already had twice as many visitors as December 2012. June 2013 had more than double the number of visitors that there were in March 2013. By December 2013 there were twice as many visitors as June 2013.
Up until October 2013 the website rarely was down. Then, unfortunately, by the time we reached November 2013, the cheap shared web hosting was starting to shut off the website for using too many resources. The website, although it was still up most of the time, started to go down more and more. This was annoying for everybody: annoying of course for you if you wanted to use Lingopolo, annoying for Goi when she wanted to add new recordings, and annoying for me when I wanted to work on the site. By December, hardly a day would go by without the website being down for some time. It was still only a small percentage of the overall time, but it was still much much more than was acceptable.
I urgently looked around at other more professional hosting solutions, and I am pleased to say that over the Christmas holidays, the move was succesfully made. There were one or two hiccups (such as the fact that half the recordings would not play to begin with), but now I am delighted to say that eveything is working well again.
The great news is that since the move (admitedly only just over a week), the website has been up 100% of the time. I think too that overall the website is much faster, though that may depend where you live in the world, because the servers are now based in Europe (where I now am), and the previous servers were based in the USA, so that would naturally speed things up for me (and anyone using Lingopolo in Europe).
The other good news is that I can see that the new servers have lots of spare capacity in terms of CPU and memory usage, so that should future-proof Lingopolo for at least a good deal of growth.
The following graph shows the amount of downtime, in hours per month, showing clearly how things started to go wrong in November and December 2013. Note that although the figures for January 2014 are only for 6 days, so far there has not been a single outage for January 2014.
The downtimes in figures (as of 6th Jan 2014), including yearly totals. Note again how, so far, so good this year:
