Technical Issues Explained
As some new readers have noticed over the past 48 hours, Yakezie.com has been experiencing some technical difficulties. The latest scholarship was listed on Fastweb.com thanks to Little House’s community outreach efforts, and in a matter of a few hours, we received over 6,000 additional visitors from the site, or nearly 6x our highest traffic day since Yakezie came online.
Last month, when we launched the first scholarship, we received 14 essays submissions and over the past 48 hours, we are averaging more than that per hour (during the day). Needless to say, the slow and steady growth that we expected for the scholarship has not occurred. Our servers were pushed to capacity and our user registration system broke under the pressure.
Yakezie.com has now been moved off of our lowly VPS onto a dedicated server and I would like to thank our hosting provider, InMotion for keeping the VPS server running even though for much of the day, it was running at 200% capacity. Yakezie.com did not see any down time during the move.
Registration System Working Again
Our registration systems are now working, and the headaches around our email notification and password reset system should be resolved. But, if you attempted to submit a scholarship essay or register for the site, but were unable to complete this action, please try again now. If you believe that your scholarship essay was not submitted correctly, and you cannot submit another because the page says “You have already submitted and essay for this scholarship”, please email it to
scholarship [at] yakezie [dot] com
If the scholarship essay page submission page allows you to submit an essay, then your original essay was not submitted correctly and you will need to submit it again. The system will not allow you to submit an essay twice, so do not worry about being penalized.
Please Follow Instructions
Please note that essays that do not meet the scholarship guidelines or do not answer an essay question will not be eligible to compete. All essays must be 700-1000 words long, spell-checked and edited for grammar, and accompanied by a short bio with picture. If you are unsure about the guidelines, see the original post here for the complete rules. Also, we encourage you to check out the three winning essays from the first scholarship as good examples. The Yakezie Scholarship Committee plans to choose the Top 30 essays to be published and voted on by readers and Members over the course of a month.
Welcome To The Yakezie Network!
The Yakezie is one of the web’s largest interactive personal finance and blog network where we regularly share our original Member content and featured guests posts to you. The Yakezie Writing Contest is our charitable initiative where we plan to host at least six contests and reward 18 winners a year. We hope you enjoy getting to know the community through our posts or through the Yakezie forums. Please also keep in touch by signing up for our RSS feed!
If you have any questions, please send them to webmaster [at] yakezie [dot] com and I will try to answer them as quickly as possible. You can also comment on this post and I will attempt to answer questions there.
Chris & Sam
Photo by Keng Susumpow via Flickr (Creative Commons Attribution)
Well… The forums appear to be much faster now! Great job on you and the hosting company for keeping things running smoothly during this time.
Yes, they should be, we have a significantly higher level of processing power behind the site now. We also updated our forum software recently, so that might be a cause of the speed increase as well.
Hey Chris, Good work putting a new set of wheels on the bus! That can present quite a challenge when you don’t have time to stop or slow down.
Nice work with no downtime cutting over. Explosive traffic is better than no traffic right? Keep up the great work! :)
Chris is like the Wizard working magic behind the scenes. I hope that we get some quality submissions this month.
that’s great! yakezie is really blowing up!!
Let’s hope more figuratively and less literally on that one, Charles! ;-)
Thanks Chris for doing a wonderful job on keeping the site up and running. You’ve done some amazing things on the site. Thanks to Little House for getting the word out on our scholarship!
Wow, that’s one hell of a traffic spike! Kudos for keeping the site up and running with no break in service.
Nice work Chris on transferring the site so smoothly! I’m very excited about our scholarship traffic and expansion.
You’re doing a great job Chris!
Oh wow, glad things are running smooth now. Thanks for the update. That’s one crazy jump in submissions! Can’t wait to read the top essays. The questions in this round are really good.
Wow that is a massive amount of visitors for one day!
Awesome job Chris in keeping up with the Yakezie growth spurt! Can’t wait to read the latest essay submissions.
I’m enjoying seeing what Yakezie has to offer in terms of personal finance advice. If it wern’t for your scholarship I wouldn’t have known Yeakezie existed. Thanks for offering the scholarship, it really got me to think! I hope mine is one of the ones picked so that it can be shared with all of you readers.
Thanks for the info!!! (:
The biggest sign of success is a server crash ;)
Yeah, I guess. I just hate when things go down on my watch.
If anyone is interested, we have maintained our level of traffic and submissions. Right now, we are at over 600 submissions, and more than 2500 users. Yakezie is continuing to push the envelope, thanks to you all!
So did the scholarship deadline get moved up then? It says that its deadline is 6pm pacific time but when I tried to submit mine it says it closed at 8:30 am. I just learned of this scholarship yesterday and have worked hard on it and its frustrating that I’ve spent all of this time and effort and people won’t even be able to read my story.
The system automatically shut down after breaching 1,000 essays. Sorry. We had to manually reopen it and allow for submissions until 3pm PST/6pm EST. Hope you got a chance to submit.
In the meantime, please sign up for our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter if you have an account to stay up to date with what’s going on. http://feeds.feedburner.com/yakezie
Thnx,
Chris, any thoughts on when the Yakezie network page will be fixed? It hasn’t updated in maybe a week or two. Thanks.
I agree that it’s a nice problem to have. Great job getting it transitioned so fast and taking care of piddly requests like mine for comments.
Mr. Johnson, I recently submitted my essay, however I have been having some trouble uploading my photograph. I will email it to you instead, because I do not want to be disqualified from the competition.
We will request photos from the selected finalists. Not to worry for now. Cheers, Sam
Chris, let me echo those who have complimented you on the site. Growing pains are natural part of success. It will be a great story some day, (after the pain subsides…)
I hope our growth continues to stress our systems. That will be a good problem!