DCSki is wrapping up a great winter season. This winter, DCSki has received over 893,142 hits, frequently exceeding 10,000 hits in a single day. This is about 2-3 times greater than the prior season, and reflects DCSki's continued growth.
I've been contemplating how to take DCSki to the "next level," maintaining its momentum and making it even more valuable as a year-round resource. In early April, I will take the first step by upgrading DCSki to a dedicated server. This will substantially increase the cost in running DCSki, but I believe the resulting benefits are worth it.
Currently, DCSki is hosted on a virtual server. This means that multiple web sites are served on a single server, competing for bandwidth and resources, and limiting flexibility. Virtual hosting works for most web sites and is the most affordable option. It has served DCSki well over the past several years. Moving to a dedicated server, DCSki will have an entire high-performance server to itself. An immediate benefit will be increased performance and response times. A longer-term benefit will be a wealth of flexibility not available before.
I have purchased a dedicated server and am currently configuring it. I plan on placing this new server on-line during the first week of April. Assuming everything goes well, there will be a small transition period as the domain "www.dcski.com" is associated with the new server. During that time, the site might be down, and I might be unable to receive e-mail. The best case scenario is that the transition will be completely seamless, but taking into consideration Murphy's Law, there might be a couple-day downtime. There may also be some initial glitches once DCSki is on the new server: broken links, scripts that fail to execute properly, etc. I've been working on fixing these but some will undoubtedly surface only after the site has changed servers.
Once on the new server, DCSki will be undergoing a major redesign. New features will gradually be rolled into the site over the course of the spring and summer, including increased interactivity, a search engine, and much more. (If you have suggestions for new features, feel free to post them.)
I am excited about this upgrade and look forward to the flexibility it will provide. This is a big step for DCSki, but I believe it will pay off.
I'd like to thank all of you for your continued support.
- Scott
As an aside, you should know that Snow Time Inc. management checked your site consistently throughout the season and had only good things to say!
