Think its been a few months since an update… so.
Just like all other pods we are growing, growing fast as Diaspora is just about to go Beta this month things are speeding up with lots and lots of #newhere folks! I have been trying to friend and greet as much as I can.
To all that have donated, thank you! It has grown past the point I can email you all 1 by one with a personal thank you. Your support has us ad free and scaling to meet demand. Just last night I moved the DB to a 2nd server just for the DB, pod is way faster today! If you have not supported please consider it, its how diasp.org pod will continue to grow and survive, options for subscriptions even at $1 a month are very helpful. We are now on 2 dedicated servers, both the same: 8gig memory, 4 core cpu X 3.2ghz, 250gig drives. Backups run nightly and sync to the podupti.me server, and to a shared hosting platform, so I have 2 local and 2 remote backups every day.
You may have noticed I had to stop Piwik stats as it was slowing things down to much and could not handle the traffic well, I am using new relic for some stats and performance optimization. Some static content is on a Rackspace CDN now also. I am trying to avoid Amazon/Google items as much as I can as I know most users to not want their data there. I will look at other hosted Analytic options this week, I need something that can handle the traffic and do not want to have to scale stats servers for Piwik, think that’s a bad use of your donation money.
I have been using a new VPS provider for stats and other boxes for a few months now (wanted to put the DB on one, but realized that needed to be in the same data center as the main pod) and I have a small private pod running on a VPS with them with 512memory and its under $4 a month. they have nodes in France, Germany and the US. If you are thinking of your own pod check them out as an option. Aff link: https://secure.uptimevps.co/aff.php?aff=071
I chatted with Daniel Grippi yesterday and went over how I am scaling and it looks like diasp.org is ready for the beta traffic. Thanks for the time, Grippi!
I hope you are all having fun with Diaspora! I am on the road still, was in AZ now in NC, home next week… I just may share the photo of me as a pumpkin ghost that my neices and nephews dressed me as. If your not connected to me: http://dia.so/david
P.S. Some stats on new users on diasp.org:
- Week stating on 2011-09-05 , 1141
- Week stating on 2011-09-12 , 1293
- Week stating on 2011-09-19 , 3216
- Week stating on 2011-09-26 , 2461
- Week stating on 2011-10-03 , 1131
- Week stating on 2011-10-10 , 1616
- Week stating on 2011-10-17 , 924
- Week stating on 2011-10-24 , 697
Thank you for all of your time spent on providing this for us! I can’t wait until this becomes a bit more polished so I can try to start converting my non-geek friends and family.
In the meantime, you should think about adding an opt-in source of revenue, whether it’s from people opting into allowing ads or a modest commission for special services. I’ve already turned off ad-block for your site, just in case.