Crashing The Web Site. OK It’s Not Funny Anymore!

It started with a nice evening out with a great client and a dinner event with Carrol Shelby here in DC. He was getting a life time award deal and we were there. And I was getting a once in a lifetime chance just to be in the same room as him. An icon of American Racing.. Dang! As I was walking in. Iwas emailed that the site was down again. There I am outside the dinner talking to the web host company and he is in there talking…UGH! Then off to FLA the next day, and live stories.. I was on the phone til midnight trying to get this fixed for the Mecum auction. It is working but limping til later this week.   Here is the reason why its crashing. Traffic. Period. Our search tools have been working too well, and are crawling the over 2000 stories is just creating havoc. So we shut those off. But still when the spikes happen around 9 and noon. It crashes. We are now getting over 11,000 pageveiws a day! A DAY! Before the new design we were on target for 3,000 and very happy with those manageable numbers. With the search robots.. Google bots.. 150,000 hits a day! Which don’t count but do drain the shared server. We have felt a serge in comments and new readers, but had no idea of the jump. Neither did our server.. A shared one as mentioned. So. We have jumped into the next strata of web site stuff real fast and gotten a dedicated server through a company,  in a couple days that will make things faster and more secure. Texx and I are all over this, as is our designers here at the agency. We are tweaking it along, as is our host who is keeping site going while we wait for the move. So.. looks like we are on track for 3 million page views a year now. With over 300,000 readers.. Dear god! Thanks for being patent and laughing along. All good signs of a robust future. And humbling… Thanks.. Matt