site news

Slashdotted, Dugg, Farked. These are all terms that site operators, bloggers, and web developers are very familiar with. They imply having a site 'front paged' at a website that drives a LOT of traffic to your own site.

Over the past week one of the sites we host, ended up on the front page of Fark.com and Foobies.com at the same exact time. It added up to some very busy days for a site which is hosted in a shared environment (meaning that it has to share resources of a server with other sites) as well as some useful knowledge concerning:

• what kind of load a Drupal powered site can handle when in a shared enviroment
• how to optimize Drupal's capability to handle a large number of visitors

To begin, it need to be understood that overall optimization for site traffic is going to depend on a gazillion different factors. If you don't have a reliable server stack which is already optimimized this article will only do you so much good. Apache, MySQL, and PHP need to be running reliably, and well tuned.

Welcome to the our first newsletter. It's been six months since we launched our first site Bloggyland.com. With another hosting site and many more ideas/plans in the making, we're very pleased with foundation and progress we achieved so far. Since last July we've had customers not just from the U.S., but also from as far as Thailand and the United Kingdom sign up with us.

This past Sunday (1/20/07) we launched the second generation HigherVisibility site. Like all of the sites we make, we used the most modern best practices and technology to assemble it, including:

• Drupal 5.0 with absolutely no changes/hacks applied to any of the code or modules. As you can see from the site, committing to not using hacks on the Drupal "core" files does not mean sacrificing customization. Since we did not modify Drupal's core files in any way, upgrading to new versions of Drupal will be mostly a drag and drop process for us. Additionally, since we use the cvs versioning system we'll be able to track changes in Drupal core as we update and see exactly what the differences are from version to version.

In addition to the core Drupal 5 modules, we also have the following contributed modules actived: