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Work it, make it, do it, makes us
Harder, better, faster, stronger
We’ve spent 4 weeks getting our server migrated from a pokey GoDaddy Shared account to a lighting-fast Linode VPS system. You can read more about Linode vs GoDaddy here: For the Love of Linode.
Why did we change? More reasons than we first thought! We initially needed emails to be sent instantly – instead of in batches every 5, 10 or 20 minutes like GoDaddy likes to do. We also were tired of outages on GoDaddy that seemed to be happening once or twice a week for anywhere from 2 – 30 minutes. We noticed through our Pingdom account that these were occurring and then tried to request support from GoDaddy. GoDaddy’s response was, “this is a shared hosting solution and we have an issue that we’re going to resolve.” I requested to move off of that particular server and was told that it is not possible. Goodbye GoDaddy…Hello Linode.
More than, hour, our, never
Ever, after, work is, over
As it turns out, there were probably a few solutions to solve our email problem – the easiest one being to utilize Google Apps for email and then connect to their SMTP server for outgoing mail.
The more difficult one is to establish your own mail server using Postfix, Dovecot and MySQL. This works fine – except there are all sorts of challenges in getting your mail server to properly send mail and NOT be considered SPAM by other mail servers. You also need to maintain your own SPAM filters and then run another web system on your VPS to actually display email (Squirrel, CubeMail or others). This was turning out to be a major science project – and all we wanted to do was send (and receive email). No thanks… Google Apps is $50 a year and solves all of these problems.
Work it, make it, do it, makes us
Harder, better, faster, stronger
Once we made the transition to Linode, we also decided to clean up some other things. We improved the user feedback system by implementing UserVoice. This gives us the ability to quickly respond to user comments/questions quickly and documents the workflow for us. We’ve built templates within UserVoice to allow instant responses to common issues. These common issues can also be published as Knowledge Base articles and made available to users on our site. Try it for yourself and see the improvement. Our OLD comment form is here. And the new one can be seen in action on the site.
Work it harder
Make it better
Do it faster
Makes us stronger
