Planned updates and unplanned media events

By Bjarni Rúnar 2012-03-08, 15:13

This Saturday, we are planning an update to the PageKite service user database.

This update is scheduled for 13:00 GMT on Saturday (March 10). As before, we expect this update to have minimal or no visible effects on users of the service. However, due to the central role played by the systems being updated, it is possible that unexpected problems may cause temporary unavailability of the service or the service website. We will update the blog before and after the upgrade takes place.

Update: Work began at 13:05, was completed at 14:10. Kites are flying and all is well.

In The News

In other news, this week has been unexpectedly busy for PageKite in the media.

Last Sunday, we submitted our latest How-To article, about combining git and pagekite.py, to Y Combinator's Hacker News. To our surprise, the article hit the front-page of the site and briefly rose as high as 10th place. Hacker News is a very popular site, so this event resulted in the largest amount of traffic our website has seen to date - but not enough to cause any disruption of service.

This is more of a feat than it might seem at first, as this website is actually served over PageKite itself...

The second media event of the week took place yesterday: the H Open published a short piece about our "Free for Foss" offer. As a result, a few more project leads have gotten in touch and we hope to add some of them to our list of sponsored accounts.

It has been interesting to watch these new streams of visitors to our site. Although much smaller, the traffic spike from the H Open appears to have resulted in far more new sign-ups than the Hacker News blitz. Once things have settled down a bit we may attempt to analyze this phenomenon in more detail and write about it a bit.

Until then - as always we'd like to welcome any and all new users. Enjoy PageKite!