RUNNINGMAP changes host
With increased traffic on RUNNINGMAP.com has come increased cost of hosting. My friend was hosting the site on his co-located box for free. But for the last several months my site has been shredding his bandwidth so I decided to move to a new host where bandwidth cost is cheaper. My friend did not kick me off his server … he is stoked that the site is getting a lot of traffic. The move was done carefully since there is data and middlewear involved. All went well for the most part. One drawback is that new mySQL DB would timeout on executing SQL dump from the old DB so I had to split the file up into about 5 chunks. Also, the chat app is down for the moment.
Consequently I have been thinking about a business model around this site to generate some money since the site is now costing money. For the short term I have added a donation button. There have been 4 donations to date. Interesting to see a minor drop in traffic since I added the donation button. I have no way to know if the two issues are related.
Also notable is that Permalinks has been updated so it now remembers the map mode. This was necessary because some of the new foreign city maps added are available only as Satellite View and Permalinks was defaulting to Map View when a route was loaded from the DB. Not anymore!
