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Hi Everyone!
[Warning: Long Post. Summary at bottom.]
It's been a while since our last update. I'm sure some of you have noticed that we have taken the main site down. First off, don't worry... we're not going anywhere. We never imagined the demand for our services would be so high. x10 was put together as a hobby and learning experience and grew into a community with over 10,000 members.
As x10 is privately funded and has never been about making profit all our support, software, and design has been voluntary or paid for out of pocket. We always try to break even on operating costs, with no money going towards myself or any other staff member. Without funding to support full time staff, developers, and designers we constantly struggle with implementing new ideas and changes. One simple change could mean 1,000 lines of code.
We've been very lucky to find hard working and talented individuals to volunteer as staff here at x10. By giving their time and efforts x10 has been able to grow to where we are at now. By doing some quick math I will give you an idea of the problems we face with managing x10 and then finally I'll let you in on some upcoming changes and updates that will help solve these problems.
With signups open we can easily pull in 300 new accounts per day. Currently we have 1,150 accounts in good standing, not suspended. If we take an estimate and say every account requires 5 minutes of support or maintenance per month. That gives us 5,750 minutes or 95 hours. Now add in just one week of open signups. We're now at 270 hours of time needed per month just for support and maintenance. There are a lot of things that go on in the background, like checking for ads, looking for illegal sites, dealing with suspensions, DMCA complaints, emails, etc... I could give some more examples but I think you get it.
Our main priority and goal has been to make x10 as automated as possible. By saving time on the day to day maintenance and tasks we will have more time to dedicate to improving services and implementing features and ideas that our members want. We've slowly done this by implementing things like the account panel so members can perform their own changes, and the suspension check so members can unsuspend themselves or see why and possibly be automatically unsuspended. These small additions give us back a ton of time in the long run.
After long discussions we have decided the only way to do this, and the right way is to shut signups off, take down the main site, and recode everything adding in all the features and requests from our staff and members. We will be automating many more things, adding in features and services that have been requested, and of course... making x10 the best free host in the world.
x10 v3 is underway. Everything we have learned over the past 2 years will be reflected in the upcoming changes. Mistakes, bad decisions, good decisions, and of course our member's feedback will all contribute to making x10 v3 the best hosting with the most features on the internet.
*Some* upcoming changes:
- Ad free hosting with PHP\MySQL Support
- Customizable ads(Possible to change colors of google\yahoo when displayed)
- Ad code uniquely for your account
- Ability to track views\clicks of x10 ads and get rewarded
- Re-write of affiliate program to award x10Cash automatically
- New subdomain choices
- Tons of backend changes you don't really care about.
If anyone has any questions about my post please ask. I will check this thread regularly to answer questions. Now would also be a good time to post suggestions and feedback in the feedback forum.
-Corey
