lastcallkillit asked: When are you going to upgrade servers? I've had days where I can't access anything in your search area, and days when the server just goes around and around.

It's not my internet, I've got 20 Mb Internet, very high speed.

I think it's an amazing service - when it works.

This one is somewhat tricky to answer. Do we take speed and performance seriously? Very much so. In fact, we’re constantly working to improve performance by optimizing code and tweaking our server configurations.

We don’t actually host on a single server, though. We host on thousands of servers at an incredibly powerful datacenter. Yes, we can pay more and more and more, but that also requires us to bring in more and more and more revenue. So, it’s a bit of a balancing act for us. We’re not going to clog the site up with too many ads, or require people to pay to borrow books, even though we could probably bring in some extra revenue by doing so.

And, of course, many of our unique features — social relationships, timelines, etc. — are very CPU intensive. Going back to the balancing act, these things slow us down a bit, but they’re also why we think we’re the best lending site. Providing social features is the same reason Twitter had a rough time of it, at least until they were able to afford to pay more. 

Lastly, we can’t really complain about this, but every time we are featured prominently by a major outlet, we see a massive influx of new users. On the one hand, this means more books and more lenders. On the other hand, depending on who featured us, it’s hard to keep up with such demand, from a performance standpoint. 

That’s all a long way of saying that we wish it were super easy, or even feasible, to just plug in a new server and make all of our problems go away, but there are a lot of factors that make the solution less obvious.

All we can do is promise that we’re doing everything we can with what we have to make the site perform as well as our Lendlers do, and that as soon as we can do more, we will.