March 2008 Update
March 29, 2008
One of the great things about the hosting solution that Onvertigo Bloggers is running on is the ability to make the changes necessary to keep the server running at its greatest efficiency and upgrade resources as they are needed. Since the launch of the service in January we have a spike in traffic and resources. In the month of March it looks like the server will have managed 350,000 hits from 60,000+ unique visitors without flinching. Part of this is because of the resources at our control and part of it was through some optimization. The interesting thing is that Onvertigo Bloggers is still an invitation only community and will remain that way as we get our growth strategy in place. In fact, we might leave it that way anyways 
The latest change was managing our database solutions and have officially increased the number of databases serving up information from our blogs to 256. While this solution is maybe “over the top” right now, it may become essential down the road and like any project, looking at the end goals is necessary right from the start. Just the move from 1 database to 16 was an interesting move, but from 16 to 256 was even more interesting. If others want to run WPMU and expect growth, my suggestion is do the 256 from the start
There are many discussions out there on whether a VPS (virtual private server) has the resources to keep up with the demands of a blogging service versus a dedicated physical server. It seems to me that the power of the VPS that I am running could handle plenty of growth and while I could eventually move to a dedicated physical server, I am more likely to run a VPS cluster solution. Maybe move the database to one VPS and the file server to another. It is not something that is required now, but something we can look at down the road. Happy blogging!
Site Down For Upgrades
March 19, 2008
We implemented some changes that required the server to be offline. I told users about it, but if the public is also following this blog, that was it! Took about 2 hours.
Just A Reboot :)
March 17, 2008
As far as I could tell, no one was online, so I initiated a quick reboot of the server after applying some performance changes on the setup. Some of the server changes dealt with apache performance and some changes to the mySQL server setup.
Nothing too amazing, but just a few things to try and fine tune the service.
Trent Adams