GCSA Studios

We have the technology.

Carter On April - 2 - 2009
Our situation at the time

Well, wasn't that an adventure...

As Flanders stated in a post that seems to have been redacted, our website did go down. It was awful. Nothing would load, nothing would respond… I couldn’t even log in to the website to fix any potential problems. You see, to cut costs, GCSA had been on a shared hosting plan. A shared hosting plan is where you share one server with many other websites. It’s like sharing one computer with many users. This worked out well for many years, but you see… for many years we had just been using static HTML pages. Ever since we upgraded to the site as you see it today (dynamic PHP/MySQL databases), things have been working fine, but slowly. Monday night was the culmination of it all. The server we were on just couldn’t process all of our PHP calls as quickly as they were happening, in addition to the calls from it’s other sites, and finally it just gave up trying.

Please understand this has been resolved in the most excessive method possible. We heart overkill. This website is now hosted on a Linux server grid. That means instead of one machine handling all the data for GCSA, there are now dozens. Our host is constantly expanding this grid, so soon I’m sure there will be several hundred servers towing the weight of GCSA. The main result of all this is that now our site is really, really fast. I’m sure you’ve noticed how quickly the sidebar widgets and pages in general are loading. Theoretically, the website should just continue to become faster as our grid of servers (the “server farm” as I call it) continues to grow.

So rest assured, we’re back. Never to fall again.

By Sharp and Flame,
Carter

Category: News

2 Responses

  1. Leslie Lyons says:

    Aw Carter, you’re super cute. How did you get so smart!? <3

  2. brittany says:

    mazal tov! :]

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