This is a Veteran Owned site

NewWoodworker.com in 2010

And beyond

By Tom Hintz, publisher

NewWoodworker.com LLC

Posted - 12-21-2009

2009 has been a big year for NewWoodworker.com LLC in several ways. Traffic continues to soar far beyond anything I thought possible and that forced a very public problem and a not-so-visible change. I have also added several new features that have been a long time coming but judging by the viewer reaction they are being well received.

Traffic & Moving

Early in 2009 the NewWoodworker.com site began experiencing occasional and largely unexplained outages. Around mid November those problems got a bunch worse. After investigating the problem it was determined that the ever-growing traffic was simply overwhelming the capabilities of our "unlimited" servers. The host tried moving the NewWoodworker.com site to a server system with more capacity but the problem continued. The only option was to move the entire site to a new, more hosting service and servers.

Just loading the NewWoodworker.com site takes around 40 hours on a DSL line so this change was not taken lightly. The good news is that the move was completed and a few small bugs worked out at the server in less than a week. Since then NewWoodworker.com has been functioning smoothly and reliably. And, we have lots of room to grow on the new servers in terms of pure traffic numbers and the size of the site itself which is now right at 1000 pages! (Note: I do not break up one story into multiple pages to inflate the page count.)

The Rest of 2010?

So what is left for 2010? Lots actually. I just placed orders for new, more powerful computers and software that will enhance the production of NewWoodworker.com content. I am sure that there will be more hardware investments along the way as well. Over the 10-plus years NewWoodworker.com has been in existence it has become very clear that it will never be a cheap site to operate. The monetary investment and effort necessary to maintain the quality and flow of material never subsides.

I do plan to skew the percentage of Tool Reviews to How-To content a bit more to the How-To side in 2010. I also plan to update some of the early videos to apply our new and much-improved technology that is coming on-board now. The list of needed stories always grows and the suggestions from the NewWoodworker.com viewers continue to come in so a lack of ideas is not a problem.

Stay tuned, stay in touch and watch NewWoodworker.com continue to grow. I honestly have no idea what features may appear in the future but I am positive that I am far from done growing NewWoodworker.com.

As always, I appreciate your support and input. NewWoodworker.com LLC was built around the woodworker and that concept will never change.

Best regards,

Tom Hintz, publisher
NewWoodworker.com LLC
thintz@newwoodworker.com