Announcement: Scheduled libcom downtime 11 May 2022

Submitted by libcom on May 6, 2022

Hi all, just a quick announcement, but since the libcom upgrade to version 5, our traffic has been so high that our hosting bill would be about triple. The new level would be unaffordable to us at the moment with the current level of support we get on patreon.
As such, we will be switching to a cheaper hosting solution on Wednesday 11 May 2022. We would anticipate some downtime for the site, probably for a few hours in the morning UK time.
Apologies about this inconvenience.
If you would like to help libcom stay online in the long-term, please do join us as a supporter on patreon at https://patreon.com/libcom

Fozzie

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on May 6, 2022

That's great about the increased traffic. Any indication as to why that is?

Submitted by Steven. on May 6, 2022

Fozzie wrote: That's great about the increased traffic. Any indication as to why that is?

I don't necessarily think that traffic has increased yet since the upgrade. It's more that the upgraded version was launched with new hosting. And our traffic has turned out to be so high that it is pushing us up into the next tier of membership.
Basically a problem with the old site was that we couldn't actually tell how much traffic we were getting. For a few years we did used to make some stats public, but we have since realised they were big underestimates. Because essentially there were multiple duplicate copies of the site in existence (like the HTTP version of the website and the HTTPS version), and we were only counting visits to one version.
That said, the old site was being penalised by search engines, particularly Google for 2 big reasons. Firstly because the site did not work well for mobile browsers, and secondly because pages loaded very slowly.
Most of our traffic comes from search engines, so we would anticipate over time our search engine results moving up, and so getting increased traffic for that reason.

Fozzie

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on May 6, 2022

Ah OK! Sounds positive, glad that people are more likely to find this place.

petey

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by petey on May 7, 2022

ok so i just bunged up my tier, you so-and-so's.

Mike Harman

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on May 9, 2022

New host isn't quite ready yet, so now hoping to do this tomorrow.

The actual downtime should hopefully be just for an hour or two one morning, will update again when we're about to do it.

Mike Harman

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on May 10, 2022

Pushing back another day while sorting more last minute things out.

Mike Harman

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on May 11, 2022

This is now done.

If you have any plans to post content, it'd be worth giving things a day or two to settle down.

Search is still re-indexing so that might be incomplete for a little while.

Fozzie

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on May 11, 2022

Will this herald an orgasmic eruption of new content in a day or two?

I guess time will tell.

adri

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by adri on May 11, 2022

will probably be some filthy posters who ignore the no-posting notice above

Steven.

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on May 11, 2022

Search indexing should now be complete, so the site should be working as normal! I'm still holding off editing content for the next day or 2 though

Steven.

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on May 12, 2022

Okay so everything is now sorted, and from our end everything seems good. So please feel free to post content, edit, comment et cetera as usual. But if you notice any problems or issues please post in here to let us know ASAP