As many of you may know, we have strived to improve the user experience of our site from time to time as we get the oppurtunity. Today, we have added one more subtle but very important tweak to the UI. If you use any device like an iPad, Kindle Fire, Motorola XOOM or even a regular laptop, you can remain on the metro UI page as you go through various articles. This makes it very user friendly to use the site.
I am painfully aware more than anyone else about the stability and performance issues we have faced for sometime now. The database was killing us till the past few days. Now, we have moved almost all the major site backend duties to Windows Azure. Our database and app server are hosted there now.
It has essentially taken us 1-2 years to figure out the most cost effective way of hosting the site and the back end, so that minimal money is drained for day to day operations. We are nearly there now, slowly migrating from a home base operation to a more robust, scalable one.
One more important part needs to be in Azure, (the RSS feeds), and we will eventually move that as well into Azure. The important part to remember is that, the main site, the database and all the infrastructure needed to read the articles are now outside my home network, and so will never go down that easily.
As most of the users, simply go to the website directly, I am hoping that this will bring us more traffic as the days go by.
I am painfully aware more than anyone else about the stability and performance issues we have faced for sometime now. The database was killing us till the past few days. Now, we have moved almost all the major site backend duties to Windows Azure. Our database and app server are hosted there now.
It has essentially taken us 1-2 years to figure out the most cost effective way of hosting the site and the back end, so that minimal money is drained for day to day operations. We are nearly there now, slowly migrating from a home base operation to a more robust, scalable one.
One more important part needs to be in Azure, (the RSS feeds), and we will eventually move that as well into Azure. The important part to remember is that, the main site, the database and all the infrastructure needed to read the articles are now outside my home network, and so will never go down that easily.
As most of the users, simply go to the website directly, I am hoping that this will bring us more traffic as the days go by.
