Phew! Saturday morning here at the office and we’ve just deployed yet another fix to the site to try and avoid the server problems we’ve been experiencing lately. This week has been quite intense and we’ve clearly been underestimating the interest in the cloud and ultimately got more traffic than we could deal with. We’re, of course, really sorry about the slow loading times and page loading failures.

Since Wednesday we’ve been deploying fixes & updates to the site but even still we haven’t been able to keep up. Yesterday saw the culmination and some pretty bad server performance throughout most of the day. By the evening we’d put out several fixes and things seemed to be working ok (albeit still slow). This morning troubles were back again and now we’ve been working on and deployed a new fix. Currently things are back but performance is still a bit slow unfortunately.

This weekend we’re hoping to be able to get past the point where the site simply doesn’t respond (the 500 page). This coming week should see the site get faster and faster every day and by the end of the week we hope to have the slowness under control. By the end of this month (yes this is all we’re working on this month!) we’re aiming to have the whole site faster than ever and running on a set-up that will avoid problems like this in the future.

Again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope that this mornings fixes will make things a bit better and that we’re soon faster than ever before. The whole team has been, and will keep working hard on this and hopefully soon a lot of the work will start showing on the site performance. Big thanks to everybody helping out and being supportive! Feel free to email me (alex@) or eric (eric@) to let us know what you think.

January 10th, 2009