Dave Thorp

8th November 2014

Strictly Come Dancing 2014 – Week 7 Spoilers

Time to put my new host to the test and hope they don’t melt into a nice big pile of sticky goo like my last host as it is time to once again reveal what the BBC can’t be bothered to tell you until tomorrow night. Just who won’t be heading to Sunny Blackpool next week. So here are the results:

Caroline and Alison had to dance off. The judges saved Caroline. Alison was eliminated!

Complaints to the BBC! And UKHost4U if you were affected by the site outages the last couple of weeks!

I’d also like to thank everyone for their patience over the last few weeks while I adapted to the new traffic levels this site receives, particularly those who commented with their support on the posts or on twitter.

2nd November 2014

Strictly Spoiler – Further Update

Hi guys, I’m back with another update on the hosting situation following the increase in traffic my site has been experiencing the last few weeks.

As some of you will know the traffic spikes, particularly when I have just posted the spoiler have been causing my web host to melt into a nice big pile of sticky goo. During the week I made a number of under the hood improvements to the way this site delivers content to web browsers by implementing caching to reduce database access and also hosting some of my content on a CDN. Unfortunately they were only partially successful in alleviating the traffic to my host and the site still went down although the number of errors in my log almost halved compared to last week so I guess the optimisations helped a bit. However this wasn’t helped by the fact that traffic during the peak time last night doubled with over 5000 views of my site during the period from 9pm to midnight last night. Traffic on Sunday also increased by about 60% on the previous week.

Clearly this site has outgrown the current host and no amount of optimisation of the current code is going to solve this especially given the current increases in traffic week on week. My current hosts solution would be to increase my package to one which costs £19.99+VAT a month. This is out of my budget even with the increase I have had in ad revenue and to be honest, I could get a VPS server for that price which would be better than my current hosts offering.

As such I will be carrying out my plan to move hosts and hope to have this sorted out in time for the next weekends spoiler. Thank you for visiting this site to view the spoiler and your patience as I adapt to the new levels of traffic I am receiving. My traffic has gone from about 3000 hits over a weekend to about 17,000 in the space of 4 weeks something I have been completely unprepared for. It’s both an exciting and a little frightening time for me!

Dave

1st November 2014

Strictly Come Dancing 2014 – Week 6 (Halloween Week) Spoilers

It was a night of ghosts and ghouls on the dance floor and here at the home of the Strictly Spoiler there were some ghosts in the machine last weekend when so many of you tried to view the spoiler at once, this site went down for about 10 minutes after I posted it. I’ve been working hard this week to try and prevent a repeat and have made some under the hood improvements to try and reduce the load on my web host and will continue to bring improvements to this site as traffic increases including a change in hosts if needed. Traffic to this site has trebled over the last 3 weeks which is both exciting and a little scary but also shows how many people share my view that the BBC shouldn’t make us wait for the results and should broadcast them live as they happen. Anyway, enough of that, here are the results:

Alison and Scott had to dance off. The judges saved Alison. Scott was eliminated!

Complaints to the BBC (and my web host if the site goes down again)