Please forgive me for starting this post by saying that Wikidot is an amazing project¹. It started with an idea to build a community - a social-oriented group of websites, using the wiki concept. Wikis for everyone. As advanced and fully-featured as we can deliver.

Later, Wikidot started growing, attracted early users and investors, and that helped to scale Wikidot from merely 20,000 users to the almost half a million we have now. But what is more important, is that we have successfully scaled from a one-man project to a scalable service operated by a small, but smart team, backed by a community of Wikidot users helping us to run the project.

After 4 years of working with Wikidot, it clearly is a successful project to me. I have been watching several attempts to build wiki farms, often backed by large companies or having millions of $$ in investment, that died without getting any reasonable traction. The ones that succeeded, including WetPaint, WikiSpaces and Wikia, are not that far away from us in terms of popularity as a measure of success. (3 comments)

We have been planning a migration to better and faster (and more) servers for a while. Adding new servers is quite easy, but when you finally need to cut off old expensive servers it gets more complicated. You must ensure no data is lost, update all DNS settings and route traffic from old IP addresses to new ones. (0 comments)

We are using various techniques to monitor health of Wikidot servers, ranging from our home-brewed scripts, to external services like Pingdom. Actually, Pingdom is really great and their automated services alert us every time there is a low-level problem with Wikidot — e.g. servers are overloaded and cannot handle connections, something crashes, datacenter has network problems etc. (25 comments)

As Pieter mentioned in the previous post, I am stepping in as a person-in-charge at Wikidot. Pieter has been leading the project for a long time (he came on-board not more than a year after Wikidot.com launched) and now he is moving to his other promising projects. During past months Wikidot benefited from several great contributions and improvements by Pieter, and I believe what Wikidot is now is undeniably also thanks to Pieter's engagement. Thanks and good luck! (16 comments)

Over the last year we've been working, at Wikidot, on creating more general tools for building Wikidot-based applications. For me as CEO, applications was always the way to bring a mass audience to Wikidot. It's how Microsoft conquered the desktop, with Visual Basic for Windows. It's how Apple bit into the smartphone market. Gaming communities and Snow Leopard sites do create volume but it's superficial. They don't use Wikidot except for text and images, and they can pick up and leave in a second (and they do). (16 comments)

Yesterday I got a distressed email from a contributor to a community whose master admin appears to have gone slightly crazy. Deleting pages and threatening to delete the entire site. Sadly, we get this kind of thing quite regularly. Which made me think that there is something wrong with the model that gives a single person life-and-death control over an entire community. (27 comments)