Recent server issues

You may have noticed that pages on the site have been taking longer to load recently. Some users are reporting that submitting activities can make the site unresponsive for long periods of time.

First of all, sorry about the trouble! I'm trying to investigate what's going on when it comes to the server end of things. I took a look at the analytics and there's about twice as many daily users as there were in June of last year, so that's making the server work harder, but I'm wondering if that's the only thing going on. Some piece of the software suite that makes up the site might not be working correctly, or the server might have some sort of configuration issue.

I think I've brought this up before, but bandwidth costs are starting to become the most expensive part of hosting the site. Last month the bandwidth alone was $70 USD, and in January it was $85. The site's file hosting is easy to manage and use, but it has the potential to grow even higher if I don't put some sort of limit on it.

My current plan is to limit activity file attachment downloads to users who are logged in, starting in July. I might only put this limit on files over a certain size, like 1 megabyte. I know this will make the site less convenient for people who are browsing without an account, so I apologize for that in advance. I don't know how much bandwidth is being eaten up by bots that are trying to archive the entire site, but even one bot trying to do that can eat up gigabytes of bandwidth. I'll have to see how it goes and if it has any effects on the costs.

I'm aiming to have the subscriber system in soon, but I haven't been able to make much progress for the last month or two. My home life has been a bit hectic and unpredictable, and I'll need to find a day to take off work to go through the business registration process at the local city hall. I'm building the Lesson Tracker system and the basics are in place, but there's much left to do.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been chuckling at how many people have chosen the dog avatar. At some point in the future I'll try and add a few more!