It looks like things are back to normal at last. The main site appears to be running and I just relaunched the VIP section without any major problems. Teh Winnar is still down but I should be able to get that sorted out within the next day or two.

For those of you who are wondering what the hell has been going on around here for the past two days, I have a rather simple explanation. In a nutshell, we experienced a record number of visitors earlier this week – more than 25,000 in the span of an hour – and as a result we burned through our available bandwidth and hardware resources like a box of matches. The site slowed to a crawl and things were heading down an ugly path of overage charges from our host.

I made the executive decision to step in and restructure things. It was that or simply shut the site down, to be honest. We ended up completely replacing the main WTC web server and we quadrupled the size of the main pipe connected to it. That required a lot of coordination with several technicians at our primary host. They stayed outside of normal business hours to help me get several things up and running. I owe them big time.

I apologize for all of the various messages and errors related to the downtime these past few days. We weren’t exactly planning to make any drastic changes to the server structure or the hosting for the site. It’s just one of those things that happens, I suppose.

I continue to have problems with Google Analytics and the tracking on our banner ad delivery. It’s going to be at least a few more days before I get the kinks worked out.