You may have noticed that Crownnote was unavailable for much of the past two days, displaying an "Account Suspended" message, and wondering what had happened with the site. I want to personally take a moment to update everyone on the situation with more detail.
First of all, thank you to everyone who reached out through Twitter, Facebook, Pulse Music Board, and the /r/popheads Discord channel to alert me or ask about the situation – it was your initial confirmations that something went wrong that helped me get a plan in action to restore access to the site.
Until today, Crownnote was hosted through a shared hosting plan. In a nutshell, this means that it shared space on a server with a number of other sites hosted by the same company; as a result, there are benchmarks put in place to limit the amount of resources any given site on a shared server is using, in order to keep one site from bringing down the entire server. Recently – in no small part due to Crownnote's growth in user activity, especially over the past few weeks – the site began to reach those upper limits frequently and severely enough that the hosting company was forced to suspend Crownnote on Tuesday evening in order to prevent adverse effects on the rest of the server. After I regained access on Wednesday evening, I made a few changes to see if they would bring the site down to acceptable resource limits, which is why several of you noticed that peaks/weeks on charts (very likely the single most server-intensive function of the site as it's currently configured) and previous/next chart links were removed. Unfortunately, that did not do enough to keep Crownnote below those limits, and the account was again suspended later on Thursday morning.
As a result of the suspensions, and in knowing from conversations I've had and have read from many of you that the slow speed of the site was the most frustrating aspect of using Crownnote, I made the decision to move Crownnote to its own dedicated server, with significantly higher resources and no limits imposed due to the need to share the server with other sites. This migration was completed on Thursday afternoon, and the site should now be fully operational once again, including the re-establishment of the peaks/weeks and previous/next chart features and a noticeable boost in speed.
Again, thank you all for continuing to use Crownnote, for alerting me when the site went down, and for communicating about both what you enjoy about using Crownnote and what you see that you'd like to be changed. Crownnote, and the Crown 100, exists and will continue to thrive because of users like you who take the time to share the music you love with this community, and I hope that with these updates, you'll continue to do so for years to come.
Next, I'm looking forward to ringing in the one-year anniversary of Crownnote's public launch next month, and along with the excitement of this new server, I am enthusiastic to work on new features and updates, including more ways for you to get involved in helping shape the future of the site. Stay tuned for more information and site updates in the coming weeks!
Kurt
Great news!