Humanitarian News moved to a new server

Those of you following my different blogs, will have noticed I have been struggling with GoDaddy, the hosting service for some sites since the longest time.

After months of virus infections on some sites, security failures, lack of performance and repeated downtime, I decided to move some of my blogs to another host.

The first, and most complex of all sites, Humanitarian News, was the first one to move. Since I started Humanitarian News, the site had completely outgrown its server: We have now collected and indexed close to 300,000 news articles and blogs on nonprofit topics. The site now gets 20,000 visitors per month, with sometimes over 40 simultaneous users.

With the help of Fabio and Andrea, two Linux/PHP/MySQL/CSS/Drupal gurus, we move Humanitarian News to its new server over the weekend. Something I wanted to do since months, but never had the time, and certainly didn't have the knowledge. So now, the deed is done: Humanitarian News has moved, and is purring on the new server, happy like a cat next to a stove. The response time is much better than ever before.

While moving, we implemented a new search engine (called "SOLR", for the nerds amongst you), which indexes all posts much faster, and generates search results in a flash.

What is even more important: we enable the customized RSS feeds once again. This is a powerful feature which allows visitors to create their own RSS feed, out of any search criteria.
For instance, if you are interested in the latest on the Pakistan floods, the search will give you these results. Clicking on the RSS icon next to the search bar will generate this feed.

Once you generated a feed, you can import it in your RSS reader, display it on a widget on your blog, or even generate a daily email with the latest articles on that topic.

As Humanitarian News monitors and collects articles from 1,000+ different websites, the customized RSS feeds give you an instantaneous overview of the latest articles on your favourite topics, from pretty much the "cream" of all nonprofit news/blog sources.

Next steps will be to move Have Impact and BlogTips to the new server.

Enjoy!