A Victim of our Success and How I fixed it

People are often telling me how much they like the HelpShop.com website. I built the HelpShop.com site upon the Wordpress publishing platform. Wordpress has thousands of feature add ons, and like a kid in a candy store, I may have added too many. And there are more that I want to add. The site looks pretty good, but page load times can suffer. I was living with the trade off, but more and more people are using the site. As sometimes happens in a crowd, you will find the one person who uses your site in a way it can’t handle. I am not sure what they are trying to do, but it is the equivalent of a thousand people visiting my site at once. The solution is to add one more feature to the site. If you care about the details, I have added the Hyper Cache plugin. The end result is my strange visitor is welcome to return. The site should be much quicker for everyone else too.

In addition, I have setup a system to call me on my iPhone any time the site slows to a crawl. I can diagnose and fix the problem right from my phone.

You can’t always prevent problems. Life is too complicated. But you can learn from the problems as you handle them, put systems in place to prevent the ones you can, and for the rest you gracefully deal with the challenges ahead.

Photo Credit, th.omas.

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