Right Wing News: Now With New & Improved Web Hosting!

15 Jul, 2010 by John Hawkins

Print this article Font size -16+

Slowly, but surely over the last few months, I’ve noticed RWN has seemed to have gotten a little slower despite making some coding and server end changes to help speed things up. There were also more and more frequent technical problems, including a number of mini-service interruptions, where all the pages would go down for 5-10 minutes and then would go back up. Moreover, despite making changes to help handle really big hits, RWN has never been able to truly handle massive traffic spikes. Yes, I’d gotten it to the point where the page didn’t go down entirely when I’d get a hit from say Instapundit & Hot Air at the same time, but it was still very slow. Long story cut VERY SHORT, I wasn’t particularly happy with the performance of my web hosting going into last week.

Then, while I was on vacation, things went from bad to worse. The story is too long to go into, but suffice it to say that there were really weird issues affecting just SOME of RWN’s readers that either had to be routing or server based. Neither possible cause of the problem really fit, but whatever the case was, it was making RWN practically unreadable for some people coming to the page — myself included. It was taking me 20-60 seconds to load the page from this location and only 5-7 seconds down the street. Worse yet, there was no end in sight to the problem.

So, that spurred me to go ahead and move over to cloud hosting at Rackspace. That fixed the ongoing server/router issue, the server is running significantly faster, and they claim the page will be able to take massive traffic hits without buckling at the knees (I do tend to believe ’em, but I have a “trust, but verify” policy on that front).

Now, all that being said, inevitably when you change servers, there are some minor technical issues. So, if you spot any, feel free to post them in this thread. Also, let me know if you’re seeing any performance changes — for the better or worse. Thanks!