2007 Year In Review
Wow, so this has been a BIG year for InsaneJournal. We have seen growth like I have only imagined. To start out the year we were in a down period. MySpace, LiveJournal, and GreatestJournal were the big boys on the block and very few users found a reason to use a small little site like InsaneJournal. And for the most of the first 5 months it stayed that way.
Then on March 30th LiveJournal made a huge PR mistake and deleted around 500 accounts for listing certain interests. This lead to an article being written by CNET News.com that listed InsaneJournal as an alternative to LiveJournal (
http://www.news.com/Mass-deletion-sparks-LiveJournal-revolt/2100-1025_3-6187619.html). This action by LiveJournal became known as strikethrough 2007.
On this date we saw a number of new accounts signing up, I wasn't fully aware of what was going on for another day when I found the article and everything started to come clear. InsaneJournal was about to change, for the better, and for good. We were no longer a niche site hidden away in a dark corner of the Internet. It seems that the Internet found us, like it or not. Well I did like it and I made a post (
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/31922.html) welcoming all of our new users.
By the time late August rolled around, it became painfully obvious that IJ had outgrown it's old little server so I moved the site to a bigger and better server (
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/35828.html) to accommodate the growth. My little baby of a site was growing up.
The site ran fine for awhile continuing to grow at an amazing pace, nothing like we had ever dealt with before. Thankfully my 9-5 life came in to rescue the site. I had gotten a lot of experience running a large webhosting provider so I understood the challenges of running a large scale site. Because on December 5th, GreatestJournal.com dealing with the same kind of growth we were seeing could no longer keep up. They decided that they were going to endorse InsaneJournal as an alternative and disabled new account creation (
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/38402.html) . This caused a new even larger influx than before. The new faster server that was supposed to support us for a long time was suddenly not quite big enough. So, InsaneJournal, upgraded again (
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/40057.html).
The new server, that I had thought to be good enough, apparently wasn't when just a couple of weeks later, the strain of userpics on the server started to take its toll. I realized that the site was just too busy for any single server to handle. So rather than move the site to new bigger and better hardware, I decided it was finally time to expand the site to more than one server. So to finish off the year, on December 29th, InsaneJournal starting running on 3 separate servers (
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/41805.html).
Now we are here a couple of days later and the site is running amazingly. We are now positioned to easily add more servers to handle further load increases. The hard part is done and I really do feel that the growing pains are over. Throughout 2007 I really feel that I learned what it takes to run a large scale social network. Because that is what we have quickly become. And I think what I have done here is really raise the bar for all of the other sites when it comes to communication and customer service. So many site admins seem to forget that it is the users who make these sites what they are. And the brings me to this ... I really want to thank you, yes you the person reading this for coming here. If it wasn't for you and everyone else who is here this site would still be hiding in a dark corner, and Tweak wouldn't have all of his new cool friends. Your generosity has helped me grow this site to a level that I never imagined that it would achieve.
Just to give you guys an idea of the kind of growth we are seeing.
Here are the stats for the ENTIRE month of Janurary, 2007:
Visits:48579 Pages:363870 Hits:748801 Bandwidth5.01 GB
Now here are the stats for a SINGLE DAY in December, 2007:
Visits:26533 Pages:1573211 Hits:2507235 Bandwidth:14.16 GB
Yes on a daily basis we are doing 2x-3x more than we used to do in a month. You guys ROCK!
Now we have 2008 to look forward to. Sometime in January we are going to reach 100,000 registered accounts. That in itself is amazing, but what is more amazing is that I feel before the end of the year we may even reach 200,000. I already have plans in place to handle the growth.
We are also working on a new site scheme. I was going to hold a design contest, but I have so much on my plate already that creating the contest was going to be too much. So we have a wonderful user who is working on a new site design that will be much easier on the eyes. I will be soliciting user input to this new design before I set it loose on everyone so don't worry you all will still get to put your 2 cents in.
2008 is going to be an exciting year.
Please feel free to discuss both the history of the site and where you would all like to see the site go in the comments below.
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squeaky) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
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