If you’ve been trying to access Gates of Vienna over the past ten hours or so, and especially if you’ve been trying to post comments, you will have noticed that our site is having difficulties again.
The immediate cause of the slowdown is Geert Wilders’ open letter to Pope Francis, which has brought in an enormous traffic surge from Europe, particularly the Netherlands. In addition, there may be some sort of low-level DoS involved, but we can’t tell for sure.
Henrik Ræder Clausen, our doughty tech expert, has been working on the database all week, streamlining, optimizing, and generally making it more efficient. But that isn’t enough to deal with all these new problems, so we’re in the process of upgrading our site to a more advanced level of service, which will tolerate greater traffic loads and provide more protection against attacks.
Unfortunately, the more advanced the service, the heavier the cost. Fortunately, we had a very good fundraiser a couple of weeks ago, so we can deal with the cost for now. We’ll have to hit y’all that much harder during the next fundraiser, but, hey — that’s months away, right?
Bear with us for the next few days, until the migration to the new service is complete. We expect a big improvement after that.
In the meantime: a hearty welcome to all our new Dutch readers!
Congratulations on getting a “surfing speeding ticket”, breaking the server is a mean accomplishment and should entail pats on the back all round…..
More hits means more vital information passing into the blogosphere!
A few notes from the machine room:
This is basically growing pains, we have no hard evidence of having been attacked. We are dealing with the matter head on, it should be resolved in a couple of days.
Gates of Vienna has grown dramatically over the last year, since we moved from Blogspot to paid hosting. Close to a million page views in November broke all previous records, and December is already well on the way to breaking the November record.
Coupled with over 14,000 articles and some 130,000 comments, we have simply outgrown the basic hosting plan we’ve been using up until now, thus the upgrade.
The upgrade will take effect within a couple of days. We do not know precisely when, but it should be seamless. Our apologies in case it turns out not to be.
As a side effect of the growing pains, we have done much tweaking and tuning over the last week, and hardened security. As long as the database keeps up, this already results in faster load times than ever, a leaner RSS feed (Pulse users will appreciate this!) and other tweaks. These improvements will stand.
In brief:
Thanks for the patience, we expect to be back on solid ground very soon.