This past week, the website experienced some performance problems. As website availability is of utmost importance to us, this update is to let you know what happened and what we've done to address it.

This past week, the site was unavailable on Monday around 7-9pm, Friday from 3-4pm and 7-7:30pm CST. There were some other areas of brief slowdowns as well.

The first problem on Monday occurred as John was traveling back from the Daytona National Breeders Reptile Expo. Unfortunately he misdiagnosed the problem as a shortage of web servers and the steps taken to remedy the issues made it worse leading to the 7-9pm outage.

Since then we identified the actual problems relate to our database. As a result we have:

• Upgraded the DB to give it more resources
• Reduced size of the DB, deleting old and unused data
• Are working optimizing some slow queries and limiting long queries

Other than one 5 minute period from maintenance, the site has been running very smoothly since Friday night. We believe that all of these issues have been sufficiently addressed for now and have learned a few lessons in the process.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the downtime.

John & Team