Disappointing Downtime
So much for that good feeling about 2024...
Just kidding!! We're only two weeks in. Everything I said still stands! 😆
But...the start to the year was not as great as I hoped it would be. 😔
As normal, we'd already been seeing a significant uptick in the number of users using the app in run-up to Jan 1st.
Where we'd usually see just over a thousand concurrent users, we were now seeing two, then three, then four thousand people on the app or website at any given time.
Come New Year's Day, we were seeing almost eight times our normal usage numbers... |
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Didn't quite hit that 8k. 😢
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...but the app couldn't hack it! 😩
Based on our numbers last year, we thought we'd be able to reach closer to 15-20k concurrent users before having any issues, but alas, we had been hovering closer to a bottleneck than we realised.
We had to take the app down all of a sudden and make some infrastructure changes, and I'll talk about that some more in the next section, but for now, in the midst of all of the disappointment and frustration, I want to focus on some positives to come out of the opening two weeks of the New Year.
First, the record numbers!
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With 2.4 million unique visitors in the first week of 2024, we saw a 50% increase from the same period last year and a 69% increase from the week prior!
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I think that number would have gone a fair amount higher but the downtime prevented us from seeing what it would have been! 😔
Okay, okay, back to the positives...
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All of our popularity took us to Number 2 in Books in the US App Store (ahead of Kindle and Audible and behind Goodreads). We've since dropped back down but I look forward to the days when we're consistently up there! 💪🏾
And I think the most wonderful thing to come out of all of this was the outpouring of love and support from everyone during this difficult time. While we know it was frustrating for the app to have been down for so long during the beginning of the year, 95% (just made this number up, to be honest. It certainly felt like it!) of the messages we received were absolutely lovely!
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We invest a lot of time and effort into our customer relations and it was really gratifying to see that pay off. 🥰
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Since last time...
Most of the last two weeks have been spent making changes to our database infrastructure, and we're not done yet! 😅
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Normally this message says 24 hours and most imports are done within 30 minutes to a few hours...
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To explain in as high-level terms as possible:
Before the New Year surge we had one large database and a live copy of it.
We thought that if we needed to scale, we'd be able to set up the second backup database as a ' read replica', and while doing this did help a little bit, our app has far too many updates every second, what with the constant Goodreads imports, for this to be an effective scalable solution for us, and so...
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I mean, I have been doing stuff.
Just incredibly slowly and when I have the time... 🥲
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Have a great week,
Nadia
P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)
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