Belacam’s CEO Report on the Recent Server Upgrades
Earlier this week, Belacam passed Steemit in terms of weekly user growth. The influx of new users quickly overloaded our servers, which were used to handling ~100–300 new users a day. Hitting 2,000 new users in 24 hours marks a record for us, and the traffic and engagements that came with it caused significant site-wide slowdowns.
We took a few days to fully upgrade our servers, and a lot of you have been asking questions about why this took so long. In this article, I’ll do my best to break the process in a mostly non-technical explanation.
So We Hit our Servers Capacity
Monday, February 25th
Immediately, our developers began outlining potential scaling solutions. We could move to a serverless system, but the development process for that could take weeks. We could double our servers, but that only kicks the can further down the road. Sure 40,000 pageviews might no longer overload our site, but a day of 100,000 would.
The Bela token has had a great week, riding strong trading momentum to a new high price and market cap for 2019. That growth is not something that we want to restrict. When the Bela token is on an uptrend, it’s good for everyone.
However, this momentum is a tricky confounding factor. Our team has to balance doing all the work that the server requires without keeping the site offline for too long, or else we’ll lose the gains we’ve made in the past week. On the flipside, if the server upgrades are too rushed and don’t work well, we might as well not have done them at all.
The Solution
Wednesday, February 27th
The initial plan was to move forward with doubling our server capacity to get the site stable quickly. Once that was done, we could slow down and take the next few weeks to slowly move to serverless architecture, which could permanently solve our scaling issues.
Doubling servers is a little more complex than just swiping a credit card and buying more. The new servers have settings that need to be tweaked to match the existing ones, and the existing ones may need to be linked to the new servers. In the process of making those tweaks, our developers Akhil and Doni noticed a few areas where we could make big improvements.
Their New Solution would require a couple more days to restructure the way we host and run Belacam. Their solution would potentially cut our costs down by 66% while still doubling our servers’ capacities. Given the benefits from that, we decided to extend the server maintenance for a few more days to get that all done now. Besides, if we weren’t doing it now, we would just be taking that downtime again in a month.
The savings are huge for us when we’re in the stage where every dollar counts, and every dollar saved can be put towards marketing, better features, and improved site security. We recognize that it’s been frustrating not having the site online for much of the week, but this sets us up for some great months ahead!
Back Online — Where we go from Here
Friday, March 1st
With the site stable (and blazing fast) once again, we’re ready to scale to new heights. In the coming days, we will be adding the Premium Accounts feature. Belacam accounts with 30,000 Bela or more in their account balance will be given a gold star badge next to their username (similar to Twitter Verified accounts), their posts will rank twice as high, and they will face zero withdrawal fees. At the time of writing this, only 400,000 Bela exists on the entire sell side at https://mercatox.com/exchange/BELA/BTC. With 30,000 Bela required for a Premium Account, it will likely be a rare and prestigious designation.
We will also be adding ads to Belacam in the coming weeks. With 66,000+ users and nearly 200,000 weekly page views, we have finally hit the point where Belacam could be monetized at a meaningful level. Ad revenue would be poured back into site development and marketing and could be the key to unlocking further explosive growth.
At the moment, we are still working to set things up with an advertising platform (like Google Adsense). However, if you have a company or know of one that would like to advertise directly on Belacam, please have them reach out to me at tyler@ambiafund.com.
I’ll see you on Belacam!
Tyler Marx
Belacam CEO
