Hopefully you will have noticed that the Smart-Thinker website and The DotNetNuke Directory (and of course PokerDIY, our DotNetNuke poker social networking site) is a lot more responsive and quicker.
We have moved from our old PowerDNN Virtual Private Server to a brand new Dedicated Server with an extra gig for RAM for that added boost! Our users on the PokerDIY Forums are reporting a much better browsing experience, and from what I can see the site is zipping along!
On the downside, for the last week this has consumed a lot of my time (all mail has to be set up again, all domain names (there are many aliases) have to be changed to the new name servers, which means the dreaded DNS propagation delay. Things always go wrong when moving physical sites and servers, and this time was no exception. For example, I noticed the MachineKey in the web.config had been changed, which has locked users out for a few days - sorry about this, it is fixed now!)
There are still a few things to iron out, but the upgrade is pretty much complete and I have to say I am very happy with the result. We were getting lots of timeouts where the IIS processes would chew up all the virtual memory and the sites would bomb out (and I would have to do a manual app restart when I noticed). I have not seen the site timeout once so far on the new server.
We host with PowerDNN, and they know DotNetNuke backwards, which is great (I am not getting paid to say this ;) It would be unrealistic to assume that things never go wrong with them - they are not perfect, and we have occasional issues, but at least they talk the same language, and know DNN as well as the hosting side. So problems are generally resolved quickly, and I would move hosts if I were not ultimately happy with them.
You can make up your own mind on the speed - check out PokerDIY (which gets over 10 000 hits a month and often has over 20 concurrent users hammering the DB (especially when poker leagues are running)) and decide for yourself if it is an improvement or not.
I apologise for the slight delay in response to support calls - in the last week we seem to have a surge in support calls due to the release on the Smart-Thinker Wall module.
Existing Smart-Thinker users - what do you think? Is the site faster now? Please give us your feedback on the forums...