Website Problems

If you've tried to access our site over the past 18 hours or so, you've probably noticed it's been down with a hosting issue. Basically we've been a victim of our own success so to speak, and the activity on our site has caused spikes on our hosting provider's server.

The site itself is something we've put together using Wordpress which we've extended to be a content-management system, this generally works well but we suspect that the activity on the site - specifically writes, which cause locks (writers do block readers on mysql, unlike Oracle) - has grown to the level where we probably need a dedicated server. We've also disabled comments, trackbacks and a plugin for recording page views, things that to me are likely to be causing the database writes, until we get get things back on track. We're also looking to move the site to a different host now so if anyone has any suggestions (we get around 350k page views per month, bandwidth is around 3Gb) let us know via email - mark.rittman@rittmanmead.com.

Things should be back up and running now, but there might be some more downtime over the next week or so as we work out the solution. Thanks for bearing with us.