Well, it has been quite a week here at SusanvilleStuff.com. Beginning Wednesday morning we suffered the longest outage in our website’s twenty years. And it was simply because we had outgrown our server and graduated into a world of bigger websites and higher technology. And, unfortunately, I was completely unprepared!
Our traffic has increased exponentially over the last two years and last June we were forced to move to a new server at our webhost because of this. But even with that big, fancy server, last Wednesday we reached the point where the traffic was enough to degrade the server performance and take us offline.
The solution, for those curious about the technology, was to implement a new top-end Content Delivery Network, which balances our server load and spreads our SusanvilleStuff content out on servers around the world. The one we are using now is called Cloudflare.
It’s super fancy, and the way the big websites work, but it is also really complicated to setup and make work. Because of that it took us a few days to get back online, affecting the site, our social connectors and our daily WebXtra subscribers.
(and in the middle of it we did a live broadcast of Lassen High’s graduation ceremony on Facebook that reached more than 3,000 people)
There are still some bugs to be worked out but hopefully by the end of the day today everything should be back to stable, and your normal programming will return tomorrow morning and your daily WebXtra will arrive in your inbox.
We have a bunch of great content all ready for you – galleries from Lassen Graduation and the Susanville Air Fair, plus all of our great regular SusanvilleStuff features. As soon as everything is stable and back to normal we will post it all.
Thank you all for your patience. It has been a very long week.
Jeremy
SusanvilleStuff Publisher
