Knitty secrets revealed!

Okay, so I don't always talk about the business behind the scenes, but this is something you guys need to know about!

You know how, whenever a new issue of Knitty is released, the site gets bogged down and unreliable for about 6-8 hours? And then it's fine again? That's because we're on a shared server with an "unlimited traffic" account that we set up in 2002. It worked very well for quite a while, but as our readership grew [yay!], our server couldn't keep up.

About 2 years ago, we moved to a "better" account with the same webhost that was supposed to alleviate the problems. Those of you with long memories will remember that it was a disaster that shut the site down for hours and hours [not just a slowdown, but a complete stoppage of data] until we returned to our old server. Oy.

So more than a year ago, the hub [aka CTO of Knitty] started seriously pushing for us to upgrade our server situation. It's taken that much time for us to weigh our options, seek out solid solutions and finally, unbelievably, choose a provider. We signed up with the new provider today.

This is a huge deal for us. Moving to the new server should be almost invisible to you, and will likely happen in the next few days. Then we get to play with it, making sure it really does what they said it would. And then we get to implement the new features we put in place in September [the thing that made the server go boom seconds after we went live? that's the thing I'm talking about] and see how we do for the winter issue.

This means that the launch of the winter issue will be a breath-holding few hours for the hub and I. You guys are fabulously determined websurfers and we expect to be pounded with traffic the moment we launch, as usual. This time, we're 99.9% sure the new server can take it and more with no slowdowns! But as a practised skeptic, I'll believe it works when I see it working.

Should we have any trouble on launch day, please know we'll be doing our best to get it sorted out as quickly as possible. But our hope is that you won't notice any difference at all, except that you won't have to post "New Knitty's UP [and I can't get at the site]" on any message board ever again.

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The other thing the new server means is still a secret! We've been working on a sister site to Knitty [nope, not Knittyspin] since 2004. We plan to let the beta version loose as soon as we can. We're really excited about this new site and we hope you will be, too. It's something we believe knitters have wanted for ages, and we're looking forward to telling you all about it. When we can.