The reason why I was in Hamburg the last 2 days, was because of the LeadAwards 2009. today and tomorrow received a commendation in the category weblog of the year. The LeadAwards is one of the most import awards for print and online work in Germany. The big difference to other awards is the fact that you can’t submit your work or website, they have to find you. So I’m very happy with the commendation! Like I said before: content is king, so a big thank you to all those today and tomorrow content creators.
But that was only one part of my visit to Hamburg. The weather was excellent, which is quite important when you visit a city. I had really great time thanks to my private tour guide Miguel. I also had the chance to go onto the roof of the Flak Tower IV in St. Pauli. You can’t find a better view over city than from up there (but I really liked all the concrete), thank you Judith!

(The normal today and tomorrow updates should resume shortly.)

You might have noticed that today and tomorrow is having some server problems. Over the last few months, the traffic on this website quadrupled, even during the last few days there was a peak of almost 100.000 visits a day. It basically reached a point where my current shared web server can’t handle it any more. So I’ll have to invest in some bigger hosting package.
But that comes along with some serious costs. The google ads, on the single post pages, generate only a fraction of those. Therefore I’ll have to come up with some other ways to finance today and tomorrow. Sponsorships or donations through PayPal would be an option. But I don’t want it to be obtrusive at all.
I would like to ask your input on these thoughts. If any one has some good tips how to optimize wordpress for this kind of traffic, please leave a comment too.

I would also like to thank all the artists, designers etc. who produce all the great work which I can feature – collect – archive on today and tomorrow. Content is king!

So again, sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your comments,
Pieter

PS: I’m off to Hamburg tomorrow, I’ll have to leave you alone with this messed up server till Thursday evening.

UPDATE (April 3, 2009 – 1:17 AM):
Thank you all for the comments! And no this wasn’t an April 1st joke. The timing is pure coincidence.
My current shared hosting plan has unlimited data transfer included, so that can’t be the problem. I also have a wordpress cache plugin installed, but I will look into those other ones.
I’ll contact my host tomorrow and ask what’s the problem. Maybe the server can’t handle that many request per second or so.
It’s possible that a PayPal donation button will appear in the sidebar, we’ll see.