Drew Burden

Ever since I put DrewBurden.com online last year, it’s been hosted on a server about 2000 miles away in Irvine, California. That server has served (hah, served) us well, and thanks to new developments at work, we’re soon getting a few servers colo’d right here in Owensboro. Since I personally do not make the money to keep the server myself, I’m migrating as well. I’m taking some other sites I never use offline, and doing some things to reduce the bandwidth footprint of this site. My biggest waste of bandwidth is MySpaceDP, mainly because it’s basically a proxy to MySpace image servers to return someone’s default picture on MySpace. I usually have several hundred thousand requests to that tool every month, and it eats bandwidth like no tomorrow. What I plan on doing is evolving MySpaceDP to a client/server model. All my side will do is return the URL of the requested user’s default picture, instead of the image itself. This is a bandwidth savings of nearly 100%, and it doesn’t waste any, because in the ideal implementation of this it’s up to the client browser to fetch the image. Everyone wins.

I’ve already made some performance tweaks to the site to help loading time and reduce bloat. I’ll keep everyone posted on what’s going on.