New structure for the British Towns and Villages Network

Major Upgrade

It has been a while since the last update as we have had to split the British Towns and Village Network site into three domains, or rather we have moved two of the really large sections into two sub-domains.

This huge job was not really a planned activity but the result of a technical problem that required a re-installation of the entire site, with nearly 2 million pages it took 12 hours to upload then to top it all it seemed like we would have to do it all over again! - However a superb job was done by our IP provider Fasthosts, the staff there worked through the night and by the time we got up in the morning they had resolved all the problems and we were up and running again.

The first thing we all decided was that this could not happen again so we looked at the physical size of the content on the entire site and decided to move the image library to a sub-domain of its own so our British National Image Library is now at http://images.british-towns.net/. As every one knows pictures take up a vast amount of space and therefore a long time to upload thousands of them by placing them into a domain structure that is not complicated by loads of additional services they are less likely to be subjected to problems caused by unconnected issues.

Another part of the main website is our British Database of World Flora and Fauna and its image library is huge and growing relentlessly so that too was moved to its a new sub-domain at http://nature.british-towns.net/.

By removing the image libraries we have reduced the physical content size of the principle domain by a huge amount so if we have technical problems again we do not have to go through such a major job to rebuild the site. This has already proved its worth as we and Fasthosts have recently upgraded the main SQL servers that drive the site to SQL 2008 and we are very pleased to report that the entire job went off without a hitch.

So where does that leave us now?

By spreading the site over a number of different servers we have much less work to do if any part of the site has a problem and that work is less complicated too.

The main domain http://www.british-towns.net/ is delivered in a load balanced environment from three servers, with the two sub-domains on two other servers and the whole lot driven by a huge database on another SQL Server and we are very pleased with the overall result.

Additional functionality

Now that we have some room and we can see the wood from the trees we have been able to add new functionality to the site in the form of allowing our users to upload their own content, both text and images, to the local pages.

We have also added basic Social Networking driven by Google Friends Connect to the local pages too. If this proves successful we will add further user driven content functions as time goes on.