Changes to Our Advertising System

Over the weekend, we moved our advertising system from our servers to a third-party, which means that going forward, the ads you see on our site will not be loading from our server as has been the case for as long as the site’s been around. We made this move not for performance reasons, but because of a stubborn issue that I spent countless hours on and could never manage to fix. So, I took the easy and most common-sense road out.

The ad system, OpenX, remains the same, but rather than us host the code on our server, we’re taking advantage of the company’s “Hosted” program, which is just as it sounds. OpenX already has the software, so we simply moved our campaigns over to its servers, and as a result, that stubborn issue I mentioned before should be long gone… gone forever *crosses fingers*.

The reason I am talking about such a boring issue is because this is the first time we’ve ever moved our ads to a third-party server, so I’d really like some input if you notice any slowdown whatsoever, or any other issue related to our advertising. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I’ve dabbled a bit with the performance and it seems good so far, but as I’m just one person, it’s hard to settle on the fact that it should be fine for everyone.

So, if you experience any random slow-downs or anything of the sort, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We can’t fix issues that we ourselves don’t experience!

Thanks guys!