T-man and his team have been updating the backend of WinCustomize.com a lot recently.  The site is now using ASP.NET 2.0 with the goal being to make WinCustomize able to handle more users at the same time.

What inevitably has happened throughout WinCustomize's history is that the site will get fast, more people will come, which will overwhelm the system, and then the site will seem slow and buggy and such.

In late 2004, we went up with "WC2K5" which dramatically increased the # of daily visitors.  But as a result, rather than the site being slow, you'd get "server too busy" or other errors.  We've been struggling along with this for quite a long time because WinCustomize just couldn't afford the servers/personnel to deal with it.

However, much of that changed this year with the release of Galactic Civilizations II. Stardock, the company that owns WinCustomize.com also makes that game (along with Object Desktop and a lot of other good stuff). The game has been a huge hit and has allowed us to buy a bunch of high end servers.

In early March, we did some server upgrades to deal with the serious problems we were running into due to the overall Stardock.net traffic increase from the release of GalCiv II.  We even had to take WinCustomize down for several hours over the course of a few days.  But with the revenue from GalCiv II, we can finally do a serious overhaul of our back end.

As of today, the major backend coding changes are largely completed.  This weekend we're installing over half a dozen new high end servers to help power WinCustomize's growth. 

Why? Because there's BIG things coming for the skinning world.  It may not have seemed that way lately right? Been a little quiet? That's because a lot of things are being worked on that you will see start to show up over the next year.  Windows Vista is coming, the Vista sidebar is coming, some really interesting new...things are coming, and WinCustomize will be supporting them all.  It's going to get very exciting very soon.

But rather have all this cool stuff happen and then have the site grind to a halt with flakey behavior, we're trying to get everything in place before hand.  By the end of next week, the full upgrades both to the server backend and the code should be in place.  At that point, the team will start to work on WC2K7 which will be a new overhaul to the front end of the site (what the site looks like, interface, features, etc.).  Good times!