If you visited the site last weekend, you may have noticed the maintenance message that went up for a short period of time or perhaps you weren’t able to log on to the site.  Well, the sites are all back up now so fear not, TechCast Network is still here.  So what’s new?  Well, you may have noticed that not a lot has changed since the site was taken offline.  What you won’t realise is that TechCast Network got a major engine upgrade.  A quick rewind of 2008 saw the network’s biggest year in terms of traffic and growth with the launch of two new sites so it was time to invest in an upgrade to our hosting service.

What happened?

I’ve been taking a look at what kind of hosting service I was going to need for 2009 and onwards.  If you’ve ever done any research on hosting providers, you probably found an impossible number of companies and options to choose from, all vying for the opportunity to be your next host.

So each year, when it comes to renew, I make that tough decision as to whether I should stick with my current provider or bite the bullet and make a new nest elsewhere. Moving a website, or even worse, a collection of sites can be a daunting task.  That is why most of us don’t take the decision lightly when it comes to crunch time.

Having considered a whole range of options, I was glad to say that my final decision was a comfortable and reassuring one.  I settled for a California-based hosting company called Media Temple, Inc. or (mt) for short.  With over 250,000 domains under their belt including a selection of household brands that you’ll be familiar with (Sony, Warner Brothers, VW, TechCrunch, Starbucks Coffee, Adobe, and many others), Media Temple seemed like the perfect solution.

Here’s what I looked at when I was selecting a new host:

Will they be able to cope with peak traffic demands?
Is there a package that meets current and future demands?
Are they reasonably priced?
Can I trust them?

Technology

Media Temple uses a grid-based distributed computing platform to host your website.  Through the use of a complex mesh of servers and networks that combine to create a powerful system, Media Temple promises that they will cope with peak volumes of traffic.  Giving the issues that TechCast Network has experienced over the past couple of months, this is one of the attractive features that convinced me to go with them. Engadget funnelled a torrent of traffic towards my review of Windows 7 Beta 1, which brought the site down for a few hours and consumed most of my bandwidth allowance.  Lesson learned.

Here’s how Media Temple explain how their grid service works:

“With (mt) Media Temple’s GRID system your server site is no longer tied to an individual hardware server, rather it is spread across hundreds of server processors. The model gives your site ever expanding grid-cluster computing capability, which allows you to scale, and grow beyond the older shared server systems and even radically exceed dedicated server performance. The way this system is made possible is by keeping track of each customer’s individual usage using a system we created, called GPU (which stands for Grid Performance Unit). Each (gs) Grid-Service hosting plan includes a large number of GPUs, which have been carefully calculated to provide 99.7% of all customers with enough resources to never exceed the GPU allocation. For those clients operating large scale web sites experiencing daily or infrequent traffic surges, GPUs allow you to host your websites without worrying about reaching an arbitrary limit before getting shut down.”
– Media Temple, Inc. http://mediatemple.net/company/technology.php

TechCast Network now has access to that grid service along with 2.5x more bandwidth and 50x more storage space than in 2008, giving me plenty of room to grow in 2009.

Looking forward

A lot has happened since the start of TechCast Network back in 2006 and there have been some tough lessons along the way.  Today, I’m happy to say that TechCast is on a solid foundation and continues to deliver quality content to the thousands of readers that come to the sites each day.

This site will be the new home for the TechCast Network where you’ll be able to keep up to date on all of my latest projects.

And finally, I thought I’d say thank you to all of you who have been following the site, commenting on my content and helping to spread the word.  Without you, it wouldn’t be worth doing.