In the last week of February, for the first time since the site went live, we experienced downtime. This was due to issues with our webhost, and required some assistance from a local IT firm to get it fixed. Given that, and the increasing traffic, we decided to bite the bullet and upgrade.
On Sunday 1st March, Bookangel moved from a standard shared host to its own server. With far more memory and a better processor, this should make the site run far faster. We’re keeping an eye out for teething troubles at the moment and would be grateful if you could let us know if you find any.
We’ve made a few changes:
– Several users complained that if they did not choose a genre, the emails were too long. Now instead of sending all genres, if a genre has not been selected the genre email picks one genre at random per day and sends it.
– The Archived books sections (books that are no longer free) are now limited to displaying 1,000 titles. This mainly affects the All Fiction and All-Non-Fiction, and all titles can still be accessed through their sub genres, and the search, but it makes the site faster.
– There’s a new Newspaper badge we’ve added to titles featured in the newspaper column.
– We’re working on a new and faster single book page
– And finally we’re fixing a few issues from the transfer, like Kindle Unlimited not displaying properly.
Upgrades we’re hoping to manage include allowing authors to add links for paperbacks, other merchants and possible audiobook versions, ads for authors instead of Adsense, and bringing books out of the archive and back to Long Term free.
If you’ve got anything else you would like to see, please let us know. If we can work out surveymonkey, there will be a survey going out for your views shortly.
