Slow Friday as we switch web hosts

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hi everyone,

just a quick note that Delimiter is switching web hosts tomorrow sometime (Friday 22 June), so we won’t be publishing any new stories until Saturday, to minimise the potential for content to get mixed up as the DNS delegation propagates — this can take up to 24 hours. Please also be aware that if you’re posting comments to the site over the Friday/Saturday period, your comments may be lost as the site changeover occurs. The chances of this happening will probably be minimised if you flush your DNS a few times tomorrow, but your mileage may vary.

I will still be writing, however; so will post some of the Friday stories on Saturday.

We’ll do our best to minimise any downtime, but as always with migrations, things can go wrong, so please have a bit of patience if they do. The good news is that (fingers crossed) we should be on much more reliable infrastructure once the change occurs. There have been a few complaints about slow site access over the past six months; with the switch we should be able to deliver a much more consistent experience. We can scale up to get more power as we need it.

For those that are interested, we’re switching to Bulletproof, which also hosts similar high-traffic Australian sites such as Whirlpool, Mumbrella and Mamamia. So you can see they’ve got experience in keeping things ticking along without interruption :)

The more technical amongst you might be interested to know how much traffic you’re costing me per month. The answer, in May, was 771GB — approaching the terabyte boundary. That same month we did about 270k page impressions from about 110,000 unique visitors, with a lot of evidence that the audience is overwhelmingly slanted towards highly technical technology professionals, including a large number of upper management types. We normally do somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 comments per month. So it’s taking an increasing amount of resources to keep the site going :) Thankfully, at the same time a record number of people are clicking on our ads, so we can afford to pay for all this!

I also just wanted to say thanks to everyone for reading Delimiter. Whenever I have a bad day, it heartens me to know that some 1.7 million people have read some 4.5 million articles on the site since it was kicked off in January 2010. We’ve also had some 50,000 comments. You’re a great lot and debating tech issues with you guys is always the highlight of my day. I have learnt so much over the past two and a half years and continue to learn more from you all every day — especially those who disagree with what I write. Those people are the greatest teachers.

In addition, I wanted you to know that the comments I get back from on high suggest that many of your comments have found their way into some very highly placed ears with respect to some very important issues. Everything we do here is being watched closely, and the site often has a more powerful influence than is always apparent. Don’t underestimate the impact that posts in the Delimiter comments can have. You might be quite surprised by the impact behind the scenes.

Cheers,

Renai LeMay
Editor + Publisher, Delimiter

27 COMMENTS

    • Heh the cost of web hosting has been steadily increasing (sometimes month by month) over the past two and a half years. Some days I wonder how the really large sites afford it :)

      • Love the site Renai, so keep up the good work :) I look forward to seeing a little Bulletproof logo on your site as well ;)
        I obviously don’t know whether or not you guys are doing a quid pro quo deal, but I’ve always thought it quite clever how Bulletproof do that with Whirlpool and Mumbrella.

  1. Just wondering if there has been an increase in hits from rural/regional visitors over the last few months. Delimiter has been referred to in comments re the NBN, so hopefully opening eyes and providing food for thought

    • Hmm. To be honest I don’t think we have that level of granularity in the analytics. I think the best we get is state by state etc, with some capital cities.

  2. I dont understand why you dont just borrow Joe Hockey’s iPad and host your website from that, thats faster than anyone could ever need.

  3. So I’m assuming that because I’m able to post a comment means I’m viewing the site on the new host.

  4. I must admit Renai, site is very snappy to me as well. Feels like whirlpool. Well done mate.

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