I'm pretty happy to announce that media content on Parkz is now hosted in the cloud.
As a bit of a brief background to where we are today, many elements of this site remain essentially unchanged in about 7-8 years, dating back to when Roller-Coaster.com.au launched. In this time both the amount of traffic and the amount of content on the site has grown hugely, and simply put some elements of the site have failed to keep up. Most of you will have probably seen periods of downtime in the past year or two; these were almost exclusively caused by parts of the site simply being overwhelmed.
What this move basically means is that media content -- images mostly -- will be delivered to users via a Content Delivery Network that is spread across the globe. Our server here in Brisbane no longer has to work every time someone views an image. This move to the cloud should completely resolve most downtime issues as it'll take the strain off the Brisbane server, particularly at peak times.
This change will vastly improve the overall efficiency of the site and result in faster load speeds and also make the site more internationally accessible as content will served to end users from a network closer to them.
To that end, I do encourage everyone to go and have a dig around on the site, particularly in the Photos and Database section and post any feedback.
Do pages seem to load quicker, are there any bugs etc?
This is hopefully the start of many more functionality improvements to come to Parkz over the course of the next few months...