Nelson County Gazette server move positions website for continued growth

STAFF REPORT

Sunday, Aug. 18, 2013, 5:40 p.m. — After a week of intermittent — and not-so-intermittent — server issues, the Nelson County Gazette website was restored to functionality late Friday.

“For the second time in 18 months, the Nelson County Gazette was a victim of its own success,” Gazette editor Jim Brooks said Sunday. “Due to server loading issues caused by the Gazette’s growing visitor numbers, we had to move the site to a more robust server that can handle the traffic.”

The Gazette’s readers began reporting an “Internal Server Error” message popping up on occasion when they visited the site starting late the week of Aug. 5th. “I saw the same message and started looking for issues that might be causing the error in the content management system,” Brooks said.

By Sunday, Aug. 11, the problem was growing more frequent, and the Gazette website was more offline than on.

“It was frustrating for the site’s visitors who receive news updates via social media, only to find the site was down when they tried to read the story,” he said. “It was doubly frustrating for me.”

The Gazette is now housed on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that offers higher performance and room to grow, both for content and the amount of traffic to the site.

“The benefit of the VPS is it makes it easy to add additional memory or server resources as the site continues to grow,” Brooks said. “I think visitors to the site will notice the improved performance, particularly the speed of searches and page display.”

COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTORS SOUGHT. In line with higher performance for the website, Brooks also is moving to attract new, local content.

“This goes out to anyone who enjoys writing about the things they love,” he said. “Have an interest in technology? Our local school system? Or do you just enjoy writing observations about life and its constant changes?,” he said. “Just about anything of interest to the public is fair game.

“The goal of any publication should be to reflect the interests of its readers,” Brooks said. “With the help of its readers, the Gazette can continue to set new standards for community news in Nelson County.”

Send your ideas or contributions to:  editor@NelsonCountyGazette.com.

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