Those visiting the website the last 12 hours may have noticed a number of “database down for maintenance” messages. Last night our recent post on 14 money saving ideas for computer users was linked by Lifehacker (thank you). All was going well there with that traffic burst, so I went to sleep thinking no problem.

This morning I woke up to site database error messages and emails about the database buckling. From there I quickly realized we had been front page dugg and as I write this, we’re listed as one the del.icio.us most popular links. Beyond that, this same post is getting linked from other places too. We’ve been slashdotted before and withstood the pounding, but we’ve never had a combination of front page digg, lifehacker and del.icio.us popular link. All this combined for a perfect traffic storm for this blog.

The good news for readers is we will be moving Hmm to its own dedicated server and fixing the pages so most of them are static (which is one thing I have never really cared for about Wordpress). These changes will have a very noticeable change on page loading speed which for awhile, frankly, I’ve been very unhappy about. Some of the category pages, and the home page take several seconds to load sometimes which just plain sucks. I am critical of page loading speed of others and it’s time to turn that microscope on what’s happening here and fix the page loading speed, utilyze more sensible and efficient static pages, etc. Alexa has it rated as “very slow” which is unacceptable.

As for hardware, we already had this on its own dedicated server but it was being shared with some of our other sites, some of which also do a decent amount of traffic, so being on its own server all by its Hmmsome will definitely help. More expenses, yes.

The site going down last night was a loud and clear message that any post here has the potential to bring in an additional burst of more significant traffic and we need to make changes on the backend and the scripts/database to be able to scale to handle this possible increased traffic flow. The site traffic has been growing somewhat steadily anyway, so these are all good problems to have.

There might be some additional limited downtime while the server changes are being made, but we’re going to try and minimize this as much as possible. Thank you in advance for your patience and support and welcome to the many new visitors today.

We are on it.

• [site news] Problems with Wordpress and slow queries
• One of our dedicated servers HD went down [site news]
• Page / site / blog loading speed still very imporant
• Nolan says Winer is “stingy” with links — is he?
• Digg 3 checkmates Netscape?
• [site news] Slow page loading issues