Moving ahead with a new server

Well, after the last fiasco with MediaTemple's hissy fits, we took the plunge to trial a new hosting provider - SliceHost. Where MediaTemple protects you from the inner working of the services and servers you buy, SliceHost just drops you in there and lets you tinker directly withe the server itself. I can choose the operating system, reboot it, and install whatever I want on there.

Anyway not getting into the nitty gritty, it took just over 2 days to set up and using an old domain name we set up the myfolia site on the new SliceHost server just to test it out. One thing really stood out - it's fast. Blindingly fast! Pages load so quick you don't even realise that you're clicking on them. We're a little disappointed we didn't do this sooner :)

So - we're going to do a bit more testing and will be looking into moving over the site to the new server. But we'll keep you posted on that.

And we're back up and runing

Looks like MediaTemple has sorted the issue out on their side and have our site back up and running again. We're really sorry about it being slow for so long and even down for an hour or so last night whilst MediaTemple applied some fixes to the server.

Hopefully that will be the last of the issues as we're planning on moving to a new host very soon. We'll keep you all posted until that happens as we may have to take the site offline so that we can transfer all of the details over.

For those of you on  the waiting list give us a couple of days so that we can sort this out and we will be inviting you all in very soon!

Slow Site Performance

We're really sorry about the site being slow at the moment. Our hosting provider (MediaTemple) is having issues with "web latency" at the moment. Unfortunately, this has been going on since about 11pm GMT Sunday night (during a site upgrade - lucky us) and doesn't seem to have been fixed since.

The bad news is that they don't really know what's causing it or how long it's going to take. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and that we'll be back up to speed. The better news is that we're looking for another provider unless MediaTemple can move us from Grid.Cluster.1 to a more reliable server. Either way, trust that we're looking into a faster, more reliable and better hosting environment to host the site.

We'll keep you posted on what's going on.

Your Home Page Goodness

Ok, we are back up and running with some nice new shiny features.

Most noticeable is your new folia homepage, filled with lots of tools and summary info about your gardens and what's been happening around folia - you can now see all your gardening buddies, faves, gardens and latest plantings all on the one page.

We have also done a fair amount of tweaking to the "add planting" page and added some more intelligence to our plant matching logic to make finding your plant name and variety a snap!

So, have a wander around and let us know what you think of the changes!

Experiencing a little bit of turbulence...hold on tight!

We are currently deploying some fairly major changes to the site and have had to take the site temporarily down.

We are working like busy bees to get the site up and running again - shouldn't be too long.