Part 1: From a witty launching to solving site problems

First, what is your favorite aphorism on the site?
Hmm... Difficult question. There are so many good ones. I tend to like cynical little observations the most, like the ones by Ambrose Bierce or Ashleigh Brilliant. That aside, one of my personal favorites is this fairly long one by George Bernard Shaw: "A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I'm pretty stubborn in refusing to resign to unproductive practices just because "that's the way we've always done it," so I hope he's right.

Tell us why you started the site. Was there one specific aphorism that spurred you to launch your site?
For one thing, I've always liked witty sayings, but I got tired of saying, "uh, I think somebody once said something like this..." So I decided that it would be nice to have an easily accessible collection of this kind of concise quotations with information on who said them.

For another, I had signed up with one of those "free homepage" services, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how much traffic I could generate without spending any money on advertising or promotion.

So I spent a couple of days hacking HTML, drawing GIFs and, above all, categorizing a list of about 300 quotations I had lying around. Then I uploaded everything to the server and started to make submissions to search engines and directories. And more and more people started to find their way to my site.

And at the start, were there difficult hardware issues or problems you encountered?
In the beginning, I edited the pages manually, but as traffic grew and people started sending in their favorite aphorisms, this quickly became unmanageable. I couldn't upload CGI scripts or anything like that to the server, so instead I wrote a script that could generate the pages offline, and then I regenerated and uploaded them all at once every two weeks or so.

But this also became pretty frustrating, so after a few months, I bought space on a shared server with a web hosting company and starting converting almost everything from static to dynamic pages.

The thing that has caused me the most problems is the steadily growing traffic, in combination with my own persistence in wanting to deliver dynamic and personalized content. Most web hosts enforce CPU and memory usage limits, and I have had lots of problems with automatic server shutdowns.

To keep up with the site's growing appetite for processing power, I have had to upgrade to more and more advanced hosting options, and I am currently considering whether I should finally go all the way to a dedicated server and thus be able to set the limits myself. This would mean a significant increase in operating costs, but maybe it would be worth it.

Do you have advice in regard to picking a web host for someone just starting out?
When choosing a web host, don't just check the price tag. Compare processing limits if you expect to do a lot of CGI or other interactive things. Compare data transfer limits if you expect a lot of traffic or if you're going to allow people to download stuff.

Compare extra features included in the price, like web-based control panels and flexible email configuration. The first web host I used was really cheap, but almost nothing was included, and their support department was very slow and sometimes didn't respond at all.

Confucius said, "He that would perfect his work, must first sharpen his tools." You recently ran a beta test for your Aphorisms Galore 2.0. How did the test go?
Actually, the beta test period was cut short because of the server shutdown problems that I mentioned earlier. My homegrown database manager, that I used in "version 1.0," simply couldn't cope with the traffic, and the frequent outages were really frustrating.

In an ideal world, the 2.0 beta test period would have lasted until I had had a chance to implement and test everything properly, but it became necessary to close down the old version to put an end to the shutdowns. Everything wasn't quite finished, but I had to prioritize stability over completeness.

Continued...