New server and website features

It’s been an interesting few weeks for the world, with the Covid-19 Coronavirus throwing us all into lockdown and also the tragic deaths that have resulted from this awful virus. As the world goes into isolation, many of us losing work or jobs completely and also millions of people being forced to work from home, we have seen our daily user numbers increase.

Before the spread of the virus, we would see daily website users between around 12,000 and 15,000. Our servers were able to function and handle these numbers quite comfortably, but as our servers aged (we moved to them in 2016), we have slowly seen them get slower. Add to this the huge database of sounds, it was time for an upgrade.

So, we moved our data server (the one that handles all the site files) to a new 4x faster server today, hopefully marking an end to the slow patches we were seeing build up at peak times. We hope you also enjoy the faster website too!

Improved downloads

Back in 2015 when we launched, we introduced a system to help us preserve bandwidth by limiting sound effect mp3 downloads to a few every 10 minutes. While we have adjusted these numbers occasionally (and do if traffic gets very heavy), we haven’t changed this system in the 5 years we have been online.

However, as we did our full website redesign last year, one of the things we didn’t redesign was the pop up that a Basic/free user sees when they download a sound. Included in this is a timer that counts down from 10 minutes when the user hits the limit.

This system was very buggy and didn’t work properly. Also the timer never functioned as we planned, so instead of allowing a user to download 3 sounds within a 10 minute timeframe (starting from the first download), it just operated in 10 minute blocks, starting the countdown as soon as the user downloaded their third sound. This wasn’t ideal because a user always had to wait 10 minutes between the last and first download of 3.

The new design

So if you’ve been in the library in the last 2 days and are a Basic/free member,  you’ll likely have noticed our new slide-out. Here is what the slide-out looks like (both the download page and the timer page)…

A Basic member will see this slide out from the right side of the page when they hit download mp3 and the system will allow you to download 3 sounds within 10 minutes starting from the first download. The improvements also have fixed a few issues as listed below:

1. We fixed an issue where the user needed to keep the page open for the limit timer to count to zero
2. We fixed an issue where the timer didn’t work on sound packs

We hope you love the new faster website and the new download system. These are the result of user feedback so if you notice any bugs or features you’d like to see, just let us know.