It was a success! We bid farewell to our hosting company in Malaysia. About 24 hours ago, we have started the migration procedure to a new server located in the US.

We ought to made the switch after our site is being throttled and suffocates in need of more resources over the months. Various modules (that run in the front end and back end) that keep the site alive have been throttled and with limits imposed prevented us from moving on.

In the last 24 hours, lots of things happened, from performing clean up, backup, restore, configuration, domain mapping, DNS propagation and countless testings are made to make sure everything has been migrated and responding as expected.

It was a tricky job in making sure the transition is seamless and transparent to the people accessing it. We kept the former server alive while at the same time building up the new server. And during which, as the new server propagates across the world, traffic are steadily being routed to the new server. You can see it happening from the bandwidth monitor snapshot below.

From the traffic report, traffic is being routed to the new server (in blue) as the new nameserver propagates across the ISPs. And about 12 hours ago, the new server is talking up all the incoming traffic which implies that the migration procedure has been completed successfully.

We hope that you can give us your feedback if you are not seeing things, the way they suppose to behave!

Happy photographing folks!

We are sorry to inform that we got to suspend the much useful ajax-powered search mechanism that we launched last August last year. Unfortunately, this feature is using too much of resources of what our current hosting package has to offer.

This feature allows us to return you the result as you type in the search box located at the top right corner of the website.

We will try to optimize this feature and for the time being, we would need to stick to the traditional search mechanism.

Happy Chinese New Year

First and foremost, we would like to wish everyone a very Happy Chinese New Year to all of our readers across the world.

Thank you for those who have followed and still following through the ups and downs in this project. It has been an adventurous year where we are seeing a bit of result in term of traffic to the website. This gives us a almost solid indication that we are doing the way people want it. And we will continue to do so.

Project development update

Explore! or Sample photos feature has so far been the most successful part of the project drawing most of the traffic in. This is what people are looking for and we are very delightful about this. Many thanks to countless of Flickr users that are willing to share their work here benefiting the entire photography community.

Trade! is quite a successful feature that lets user to post up their buy/post postings but we are going to restrict to local community, for now. It is still technically in Alpha version but we are looking into expanding its features and making it more robust some time soon.

Camera specifications has not been working well and it’s not receiving much attention we thought it would. We thought that maybe we can make it into a one-stop centre for all, all in one, one in all. We will look into this aspect seriously.

A sneak peek to what we may be looking into. Rather than selecting piece of lens or body and seeing the photos, we are going another step further. We are going to help you picking the lens that you need through a some selections.

Hosting

We do not certainly have the best hosting package in the world. We are riding on shared hosting plan which means it’s quite vulnerable to frequent downtime just like the 3-4 hours downtime we had today. Whenever some other occupants of the server mess up, we are doomed.

The advertisements you are seeing in this project can hardly fund the cost of keeping this project alive. Budget is a big issue that does not allow us to take on better hosting plan. We hope that things would turn out better soon before everything starts breaking off.

Have a safe journey home everyone! Happy Chinese New Year once again and keep it clicking!

PS: It’s a one man show actually. I thought that the use of “we” in this context would make things sound, well, professional. Started as a pet project, I hope that this project would benefit someone, somehow, someday!

We have received a note from our web hosting company on a scheduled server downtime in 10 days time. Our website will not be available for an estimated duration of 2 hours. Here’s the bits.

Date: 28th Jan 2011
Start Time: 3.00PM GMT +0800
Estimated Duration: 2 Hours

This is to make way for a new software update on server’s management system. And before that, we will be performing some routine check and backup just in case if anything really bad were to happen. For now, everything is good and kicking!

We will bump this post up again when we are coming near to it.

Happy photographing folks!

On this posting, we have updated The Hall of Fame (Photos) (also known as Popularity Based on Photos) page with figures in table form just like what is shown in the screen capture below. This would be consistent with what we have in the Popularity Based on Visits page.

Just hit on the photo below and it will bring you to the page. It’s very lengthy. Beware of information overloading though!

But there’s still something missing in one of the tables actually. In the Top Camera Body section, there’s no linkage of the camera model to it’s appropriate page. This is due to complication on how the data is structured in our system and in this section, we are generating result directly from the data we fetch from flickr. So, a little bit of complication here but we will overcome it soon.