I wanted to say, “Let’s hear it for the dogs!” — but before I can, I need to say: “Let’s clean house for the dogs…”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of BloodhoundBlog life: This is a very busy place. It always has been, but this one site — BloodhoundBlog — has been a huge resource hog virtually from day one.

We started off on a shared account at GoDaddy.com, but our traffic and our RSS subscriptions were killing us, so we had to move to a semi-dedicated server at HostGator.com.

Not long after that we had to move again, this time to a dedicated server. We ran all our domains off of that one box, but it was BloodhoundBlog that created all the headaches.

Since we’ve been on the dedicated server, we’ve had to go into both the server software and our WordPress configuration again and again to try to squeeze more performance out of the hardware.

As you will recall, we had a huge crash last summer, losing days of data and hundreds of comments. At that time, we moved to a different dedicated server — having smoked the first box to death.

And guess what? Here we are again. We’ve been redlining this server for months. In the past few weeks, we’ve been running from 30% to 75% of capacity for twenty hours a day. Surely you’ve noticed the sluggishness of service while waiting for posts to display or for comments to post.

So we’re moving yet again. Sometime tonight (I hope), we will be upgrading to much more robust hardware, a much faster server with four times our current hard disk footprint. I wish I could say that this will be our last move, but I’m sure it won’t be.

Unlike the server swap last summer, we’ll be moving to new IP addresses, which will entail an update to all the Domain Name Servers in the world. What that means is that the BloodhoundBlog you see over the next few days may or may not be the new server. If you land here by way of a non-updated DNS server, you will be landing on the old server. When I can, I’ll post a note to the new server to distinguish the new one from the old one.

Practically speaking, a DNS change will take less than six hours for 95+% of the people who visit here. The farther away you are from the U.S., the longer the change might take.

In any case, I was thinking last night that I wanted to make a public salute to all the hard-working dogs who write here. But before I can do that in a way that means something, I have to get us back to a reasonable state of service.

Meanwhile, if you write with us, take heart. The RE.net is crawling with people who swear they don’t read BloodhoundBlog. We’re having to grow into an even bigger dedicated server because those folks are avidly not-reading every word you write.

Don’t ever doubt my gratitude for the insanely great intellectual spirit you bring to this place — not just the contributors but the smart, fun people who read and comment here. We’ve had growing pains here from the very beginning, but just look at the amazing things we have grown here!

More news later — when we go dark and when we come back.