Yes, Sparklette is saved!

On Tuesday, I posted about the imminent danger of this website being forced to shut down. Immediately, my Twitter stream and email were inundated with retweets and messages offering help and support. A surprising good number offered free hosting. I realised just how fortunate I am to have a ready network of resourceful and savvy people that are keen to help.

Thank you

Lucian, the wonderful guy that he is and a firm supporter of Singapore bloggers, went out of his way to sponsor a whole year of free grid hosting – no strings attached. Thank you. Previously, Lucian also rendered his kind assistance when our friend Kevin Lim, a fellow Singaporean blogger, had his thousand dollar bill shocker.

I also wish to thank you for spreading the word, offering me great advice, and just simply caring: skinnylatte, Santoso, hwsoh, amourchaleur, chuyeow, litford, GrowlyBear, nanyate, victortan, patlaw, claudia10, tangenghui, luthieawu, darkholme, littleredbus, nimopress, imknight, soyuzno, hongkiat, pixeldeath, nickpan, metacole, dregar, Kidtalentz.

Then there are the following individuals, an exceptional group, who are willing to go the extra mile:

  • Saad Kamal, for offering his private dedicated server and loads of expert advice
  • U-Zyn, for his enthusiasm in getting me on board his cloud hosting solution
  • Kevin Lee, for kindly letting me share his unused bandwidth
  • Martyn Hunter, for writing to the Singapore government to sponsor a needy small-time blogger (me)
  • Anton, for offering to help with hosting
  • Someone who wishes to remain anonymous, for volunteering to host me

More than anything, I am deeply comforted and moved by your show of support for this website. Thank you!

Moving on

Right now my main priority is to keep the site running. The past couple of days was spent migrating my entire website and database to my new host. It’s been working well, although I’m a little concerned about overusing server resources, not unlike Kevin’s experience with the same host. So far I have encountered a few database connection errors during peak hours. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this works.

This episode is an example of a challenge that bloggers may face. In between sourcing for materials, providing fresh content regularly and responding to user feedback, there is plenty that goes on behind the scene. When I think about it, I probably spend more time and energy keeping the website up and running than providing the actual meat. It shouldn’t be this way.

After this, I am keeping an eye on the website performance. A new design would be coming up shortly that is minimal in graphics.

If anyone is willing to take a look at my WordPress site to see how it can be further optimised in terms of code and queries, please drop me a note and I would be keen to set up an account for you. Maybe we can even learn a thing or two from each other!