A few days ago someone shared a link to the site in a facebook group, this brought a ton of new users to the site. The instant jump in traffic was enough to make the site automatically scale up to have more resources to meet the demand. I really never expected that to happen. But the response to the site has been very positive, so I'll keep working on it. In the month or so the site has been up, the number of daily unique users is at a point where it is nearly 100x more than what I expected to see. It's been pretty crazy.
Most of the recent work has been back end stuff that isn't going to be seen by the users, but in the next week or so I should have more features available on the site. Last night I came up with a database query that is going to be the core of a "custom search" sort of feature. What I have in mind is a page that lets you select what options you want to search by, and the site will come up with a list of vehicles that have all of those options. So if you want to know how many cars are out there with Z07, exposed carbon aero, and exposed carbon wheels... the site will be able to tell you (if anyone cares, the number of Z06's with those 3 options is currently 102). This sort of a tool will get a little resource heavy, so I am going to have to add some resources and conserve the existing resources to keep the site performing well.
That brings me to the next point... increased traffic and increased features require more resources... which increases costs. In the next month or so, I'll be adding some banner ads to the site to hopefully generate some revenue to offset some of the costs of running the site. I don't really expect I'll be making any money from those, but enough to cover a decent portion of the current monthly hosting bill. I hate ads as much as anyone, so I'll make sure to do it in a way that isn't obnoxious and is hopefully only minimally annoying. Maybe I will also seek out site sponsors.. so some of the ads could be for Corvette related sites or vendors.
Tonight I added the interior colors to both the Stingray and Z06 dashboards. Those dashboards have a lot of database queries behind them, so they take longer than I would prefer to load. I figured out a way to handle this and ease the load time pain, I should have it set up in the next week or two. It's one of those things that is going to increase costs...but at the same time it will free up resources for the "custom search" feature I mentioned earlier.