27 Sep 09 Tweekly.fm – Growing Pains

Tags: donate, hosting, tweeklyfm

It took 8 months for the first 5000 users. It took 1,5 months for the next 5000. Yes, Tweekly.fm is now serving just under 10 000 music loving Twitter users.  Thank you very much. 20k unique visits, 385k pageviews (according to awstats) and a 430k alexa rank. I can see why:

“i am adding tweekly.fm and i must say i’m very excited about it’s existence, what a treat”

“tweekly.fm might be the best thing ever. and it’s saturday night. i am a loser.”

“haha, yeah, thanks. tweekly.fm just rules. :p”

“gives me a reason to start using Last.fm again. Nice service”

“Love this service. So cool to see everyones tweets on Saturday!”

And the roller coaster ride is just beginning! It’s growing so fast, I can’t keep up. Tweekly.fm is on a shared server at the moment, and I’m overloading it every time I send the tweets. I’ve been trying to figure what causes it the whole week. I tested the script again and again, and it turns out it was the XML that was slowing the whole script. It can’t be last.fm’s side of things (unless they are limiting calls without any notice), so it is definitely on my side of things.

I’m still in contact with my hosting provider. It could either be the fact that server to server transfer is rather slow. I’m still going to try and optimise the script.

But, this basically means the inevitable. I’m going to have to switch to a dedicated solution for Tweekly.fm some time soon. I can’t contain Tweekly.fm’s growth. In order to maintain efficient service, I might have to stop new sign-ups and if push comes to shove, I might also have to stop sending tweets until I can figure it all out. My problem with Tweekly.fm is, is that it’s a part-time project. Luckily my studies are taking a nice dip this coming weeks before the exams, so I’ll try my best to figure it all out so that all you people can just continue listening and sharing your top artists. (new design coming soon too)

If I have to move to a dedicated solution, I’ll have to gather some investment or at least get some dedicated advertisers to maintain it. The current advertising (only adsense) covers costs only just. It won’t cover a dedicated server (385k pageviews. contact me for advertising).

Because I don’t have a solid income (studying) to support Tweekly.fm, I have to rely on advertising. I’ll have to think real hard where I’m going with this. I might have to include a premium part to keep it all running.

For now I must wait and hear what my hosting company is going to say. Till then you can support Tweekly.fm by either advertising on the River Brothers network or donate through paypal (go to www.tweekly.fm. The donate button is on the front page).

Every little help is appreciated!

But most of all! Just keep listening!