EA Serve has been chosen as the new host for XboxFriends.com...

…and will be the future home for AddressOf.com.

Moving to EA Serve allows me to add several new features that have previously been a non-option in the past. The performance is much better across the board. Ping times are about 1/3rd of what they were previously and since it’s a dedicated server… all the CPU usage goes toward servicing the traffic for XboxFriends.com (and a couple of extremely low traffic sites). Passport and SSL will also be added to XboxFriends.com in the near future.

So what’s going on with XboxFriends.com? Well, several things. I’ve just put up an issue tracking / project management tool for a few projects (including Xbox Friends Thing). Not much in there, but you can see a few of the new goodies that are coming. Completely redesigning the database to improve the overall performance and decrease bandwidth usage while adding the groundwork for a ton of new capabilities. This of course is going through several rounds of testing prior to settling on a final design. As you can probably guess, most of the interaction with the database is also going through stored procedures. Another bonus to being at EA Serve is that the SQL Server is on another machine… freeing more of the CPU on the web server to handle the Internet traffic.

I want to thank Eric Pratt for getting everything set up and if you are looking for a host, I have zero complaints with EA Serve.