moanblog

Hello and welcome back! I hope you haven’t missed us too much. Or, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ll fill you in: we’ve been offline for a few minutes. See, we’ve been switching webhosts. I’ll get into that in a moment.

But first, allow me to introduce myself. I’m a Dutchman called Pascal and I’m a psychology student at the University of Amsterdam. You can now forget all of that again because, don’t worry, this is not some sort of social experiment. Around here I’m simply known as the code monkey. With a little help from the excellent CodeIgniter framework, I typed up the backend code for moanlog. I also try to make sure everything stays up and running smoothly.

Which brings me back to us switching over to another webhost. Up until now, we’ve been using Media Temple’s Grid-Service. Me being based in the Netherlands means that the site has never been too fast for me, mostly due to the latency between the US and Europe. But over the past few days, the site has been remarkably slow and even downright unreliable.

We’re not the first web ‘start-up’ (if we are even that) not to have a revenue model in sight, so we try to spend our own heard-earned cash wisely. As such, we decided yesterday to move away from a $20/month service that doesn’t work out for us, and instead put moanlog on a hosting account I already had somewhere else.

For our US-based users, it means their traffic will now have to travel a bit further, as this new server is based in the Netherlands. However, none of our American test subjects detected any noticeable slowdowns, so if you are from the states, we hope you’ll have a similar experience. For everyone else, the site should now even be a bit faster.

So far for our big intercontinental move. If you’ve noticed any changes in speed of our site’s page loads, please let us know how fast the site is for you now – we’d love to hear about your findings!