V-Announcements: We’re Back!

We've been Buysse

I have to tell you, there is very little that gets me as aggravated as having Velominati go down. Its like having kids kicking down my sandcastle when I was a kid, watching helplessly as your labor of love collapses right before your eyes. We’ve spent the better part of the last month with the site staggering like a drunkard between being online, offline, and painfully slow. Its no way to live.

I’ve been unhappy with our host for a while, but I’ve been reluctant to move on because of the risk in changing platforms and the downtime associated with such a move. But, as my VMH cleverly pointed out on Sunday afternoon while I was tearing my hair out, I might as well take advantage of the downtime to change hosts. So we did.

After a careful evaluation, I settled on a WordPress-specific host called WP Engine. All these guys do is WordPress, and their servers are tuned specifically to the unique loads this platform imposes. They are like the Classics specialists of WordPress hosts. To my surprise, however, once I moved the site and data over to their platform even they couldn’t accomodate it without getting some of their specialists involved. I had a feeling Velominati imposed some unique demands on the platform, and it was a bit cathartic to have them express surprise over the volume of data we have. The Rules in particular has such a high volume of traffic and posts (several million hits a year and 11k posts and counting) that it simply causes things to choke. They also helped me find some optimizations in the code that helped reduce the load on the servers.

Part of the optimizations include changing how the photo upload tool works; you can still upload multiple photos into your posts, but the album tool is dead. I built that myself as a way to share photos with my family before we ever launched Velominati; it was never designed to support the kind of traffic we have here. So DM Albums is dead. Let us thank it for its service and wish it well. A-Merckx. On the plus side, you can now add captions to any photo you upload, so that’s kind of cool.

Anyway, we got it all up and running and last night I poured myself a stiff drink and flipped the switch on the domain name to point to the new boxes. Words can’t express my relief when I woke up this morning and everything was humming away nicely. We’ll give it a day or so before posting up new content just to make sure we’ve got everything squared away.

Its great to be back; let us know if you notice an improvement in site performance or anything that doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Vive la Vie Velominatus!

frank

The founder of Velominati and curator of The Rules, Frank was born in the Dutch colonies of Minnesota. His boundless physical talents are carefully canceled out by his equally boundless enthusiasm for drinking. Coffee, beer, wine, if it’s in a container, he will enjoy it, a lot of it. He currently lives in Seattle. He loves riding in the rain and scheduling visits with the Man with the Hammer just to be reminded of the privilege it is to feel completely depleted. He holds down a technology job the description of which no-one really understands and his interests outside of Cycling and drinking are Cycling and drinking. As devoted aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it. Frank is co-author along with the other Keepers of the Cog of the popular book, The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple and also writes a monthly column for the magazine, Cyclist. He is also currently working on the first follow-up to The Rules, tentatively entitled The Hardmen. Email him directly at rouleur@velominati.com.

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View Comments

silkrider says:

Feb 20 2015 at 8:12 am

Welcome back. Just read "The Rider" by Tim Krabbe and all I could think about was The Velominati.
VbyV says:

Feb 20 2015 at 11:15 am

Welcome back Velominati!!

Have a Beer!
snoov says:

Feb 20 2015 at 11:43 am

After almost a year and a half as a new dad I'd not had much time to visit the site. When I decided to give it a go to see when the VSP kicked off I was shocked that you'd all disappeared!

So so glad it was a temporary situation and I'm looking forward to enjoying the articles and banter helping motivate me back out regularly on the bike. VLVV
frank says:

Feb 20 2015 at 12:10 pm

@Teocalli

@ChrisO

Sigh, one thing is still the same – my IP address from home is still on the blacklist.

Have to use the VPN to comment, or do it from work.

but @frank is in clearly in high spirits as the +1 badge does actually exist…………………

Hey, me saying "+1" and awarding the badge are two different things. I expect everyone to be funny and clever and witty and a bit of a jackass (Rule #43) but the badge is only awarded if you truly outsize expectations.
frank says:

Feb 20 2015 at 12:11 pm

@ChrisO

Sigh, one thing is still the same – my IP address from home is still on the blacklist.

Have to use the VPN to comment, or do it from work.

That is just so weird. And the fact that I can't whitelist you makes me insane. And I'm sure there are others who struggle with the same thing but I have no way of knowing (we get about 1000 spam comments a day, impossible to filter them.)
girl says:

Feb 20 2015 at 12:57 pm

Very nice to see the site back up and running. Nice work @frank. It would be interesting to see how everyone's riding kilometres spiked since we clearly had more time to ride.
Teocalli says:

Feb 20 2015 at 12:58 pm

@frank

@Teocalli

@ChrisO

Sigh, one thing is still the same – my IP address from home is still on the blacklist.

Have to use the VPN to comment, or do it from work.

but @frank is in clearly in high spirits as the +1 badge does actually exist…………………

Hey, me saying “+1″ and awarding the badge are two different things. I expect everyone to be funny and clever and witty and a bit of a jackass (Rule #43) but the badge is only awarded if you truly outsize expectations.

I trust the very last bit is not a ref to @ChrisO's porn link.................
JohnB says:

Feb 20 2015 at 1:41 pm

@snoov

Great to see you back posting. I must apologise for not popping in to visit to see how the family and the house has developed! Catch up on the bike soon.
Gilbert Saucedo says:

Feb 20 2015 at 2:09 pm

Thank you Frank. A toast of fine Belgian Ale in my newly received V-pint glass!
wiscot says:

Feb 20 2015 at 2:52 pm

@girl

Very nice to see the site back up and running. Nice work @frank. It would be interesting to see how everyone’s riding kilometres spiked since we clearly had more time to ride.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, I live in Wisconsin. To say it's been a bit nippy of late is an understatement. I think the high was like 4 degrees yesterday. Not. Riding. Weather. You know it's bad when the weather guy on the radio says, unironically, "it's going to warm up nicely to 16 degrees today."

Still, I have 5 rides in this year which is 5 more than this time last year!