Four great years of Ping.sg

It’s been 4 great years of Ping.sg!

Growth

We have been growing steadily since our launch back in 4 July 2006.

Over the last 2 years, we have had steady >100% growth of number of registered users every year.

There has been more blogs added to Ping.sg in the 4th year alone compared to the number of blogs added for the last 3 years combined.

Needless to say, the number of blog posts we syndicate each day have been increased very significantly over the years. We now have >5000 new blog entries every single day! The numbers completely dwarfed what we were syndicating per day for the first 3 years.

Coping with growth

Obviously with such a high increase of activity and traffic on Ping.sg, our old dedicated server was not able to support it well.

Over the course of last year, we have done tremendous work in optimizing our code (for the technically-inclined, this means lots of indexing and lots of caching with both memcached and file-cache). We have also moved our whole infrastructure from a dedicated server in a data center in Singapore to be fully cloud-based, to enjoy the benefit of easy parallel and vertical expansion of our hosting infrastructure.

Since the start of 2010, we are fully hosted on Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing platform. Though at that time, our main compute server was located at eastern USA, we made sure our system exploit the content distribution network (CDN) to make sure that the majority of our users, who are based in Singapore, are still able to enjoy the speed of Ping.sg. In April 2010 when Amazon launches the availability of Singapore cloud infrastructures, we immediately switch ours from USA to Singapore.

Moving ahead

Despite the changes on our software and hardware infrastructures, we admit that there has not been much feature updates for the last 1 year. While it has been our intention to extend the services of Ping.sg further, due to the limited resources that we have, we have had to deal with the pressing matters at hand – coping with the growth, and optimizing and cleaning our codebase.

With the current position that we are in now, we now have an inflow of a large amount of blog-related data, including and not limited to blog posts, categories, content, and user activities. With such vast amount of data, the current presentation is quickly becoming obsolete. It’s becoming almost impossible to pick out the good articles from the sea of information. We are currently experimenting with new presentation on our site. Moving ahead, we aim to showcase and heuristically determine interesting/noteworthy blog posts based on visitor’s interests.

Ping.sg is still a blogger community and we aim to continue to improve to not just bring more traffic to bloggers, but to also aid in connecting bloggers in the region and making blogging more fun and rewarding.

Thank you!

All of these are only happening thanks for the continual support of the bloggers and blog readers. Thanks for giving us a healthy growth for the last 4 years!

Many thanks to our sponsors as well for believing in us all these years. We couldn’t have grown without any of your support!

Stay tuned for more updates soon. If you have any feedbacks for us, feel free to email us at we@ping.sg. You may also consider joining our beta program for helping us to test our new features.