Movin' On Up (To the East Side!)

1,597 unique visitors. 3,442 distinct visits. 10,484 pages served with 34,860 hits consuming 2.23GB of traffic. And that's just last month.

What does this all mean? It means we're outgrowing our cable modem connection and need to move to new digs. That traffic doesn't include Shauna or I checking in on the website, traffic by crawlers (like Google, MSN, etc.) or the mail messages that go bouncing around. The current rate of traffic puts us on-target to pass 3GB for the month in viewed traffic alone.

I started up a new webserver today at a hosting company (Slicehost, if you're interested) in preparation for the move. In the process, I'm taking everything I've been learning lately about network security and building a better server, a faster server. The Six Million Dollar Server if you will (though it's really only $20/mo). Iptables is out in full force and I'm setting up HTTPS so that anyone with a tin-foil hat can post on our site without worrying about the G-Men.

I'm also taking this opportunity to upgrade us to WordPress 2.1. I've been putting it off for a while because of the major compatibility problems with moving from 2.0 to 2.1. Just from my brief experimentation, our current theme doesn't work properly (though I might have found a close approximate) and several of our plugins, the photo gallery included, are entirely non-functional. Trying to test that kind of stuff on our production server just didn't seem like a good idea. I've been adding in things slowly to make sure I can get a basic setup working before I try migrating our existing website over.

It's probably going to be a couple of weeks before I make the cut so I can complete plenty of testing, so there won't be any outages anytime soon. Just be prepared for a little dust in the future.