Car Throttle News - August 2009

Another few months have passed here at Car Throttle, and I thought it would be best to share some of the highlights and not-so-great moments from behind-the-scenes with the community here. In short, we've really pushed the boundaries in terms of content production, have seen 5 high definition wallpapers go live and pull in huge traffic, have experienced hosting difficulties and significant down-time, and have had traffic highs - all in an extremely small space!

The Throttle Highs

July was really a cracking month for us which saw over 20,000 pageviews to the site, pushing us up into big-boy territory. It's now safe to say that we are competing with the larger automotive websites on the internet and we hope that we can continue the upward trend. Indeed August as a month is showing promising signs despite the notorious "summer slowdown".

We also heralded the release of 5 high definition performance car wallpapers. Designed by Photoshop-whizz George Louizou, these have proven themselves to be a real success and continue to be our most visited page. Below is a screenshot of my desktop with the Mercedes Benz SL65 wallpaper. If any of you are using one of the shots, it would be great to see an image of your setup too in the comments below!

Finally, we're starting to see the fruits of our labour in the form of a tight-knit and very supportive community. Many thanks to you all who frequent the site daily and who engage in the conversation through insightful comments. Without wanting to sound like a cheesy Oscar-winner, we really wouldn't be where we are without you.

The Throttle Lows

Following on from the previous point, anyone who does follow our progress on the site daily will have been confronted by blank screens, suspended site and error messages over the past few days. Firstly, my sincere apologies to those who were unable to get their daily dose of performance car information during our outages. Car Throttle has been experiencing severe growing pains due to high traffic and CPU loads on our previous server and as a result, we've had to move hosting companies.

Fortunately we are now in the hands of Penguin Militia. Managed by Aaron (room-mate of our very own James) this company is highly recommended as Aaron does a great job with support. Hopefully we can keep growing whilst being hosted on his servers without too many more outage encounters.

Please do remember to follow Car Throttle on Twitter, as this is where it is easiest to post and find breaking news such as site outages so you don't get too frustrated!

The Road Ahead

As always, Car Throttle will continue to press on throughout the remaining summer months. I am constantly on the lookout for new ways to innovate within the automotive information space and you can be sure that we will be releasing new features to the site, and I hope to have a complete site overhaul very soon to incorporate some new features that will definitely help with Car Throttle growth.

We are also looking forward to welcoming more advertisers. If you too are interested in advertising on Car Throttle at very competitive rates, then take a look at our Advertising page and do get in touch with us to see what we can do for you.

In the meantime, here's to a fun-filled rest of August! As always we welcome your comments, insights and feedback on our journey so far, so feel free to join in below in the comments section!