Winksite’s scheduled server upgrades went off without a hitch today – no data was lost, nothing broke, and as it was completed in just over an hour I think the downtime passed relatively unnoticed. At this point all services have been successfully tested and we have received zero customer support requests.

Advance planning certainly pays off. Well done Jason!

…and for those of you that care about this kinda thing. Whereas our recent traffic increases resulted in our database servers being maxed out at peak times (98% usage) our new set-up is supporting that same level of traffic at about 2%. Nice.

(Note: More next week on what that data traffic looks like.)

Winksite is currently serving 20K publishers, a quarter million monthly users across 150 countries, and continues to grow daily. While our data center has performed well with next to zero downtime, recent increases of traffic have made some aspects of our service a bit sluggish to visitors at certain points of the day.

To head off any nasty, unplanned interruptions to service we have planned a necessary upgrade to our servers. Part of this upgrade involves moving our database to a larger, faster server that will accommodate future growth. Unfortunately, this requires us to take Winksite offline for several hours on Thursday, Nov 30th.

We apologize in advance for this interruption of service and promise we will do everything possible to keep the downtime to a minimum. We’re really excited about the performance increases these upgrades will bring (yep, we’re geeks) and look forward to providing all of you with continued mobile access to the content and connections you have grown accustomed to.

This obviously deserves a detailed post but with a ton of “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text to replace this weekend that will have to wait.

In the meantime…

At Winksite it has always been our goal to provide a service that supports how people prefer to engage their mobile devices (and each other) rather then what we “hoped” they would do. We purposely developed a tool that was designed wide in order to learn as much as possible. We figured, launch a flexible publishing tool, step out of the way, watch, listen, then respond with innovations. Along the way we talked to hundreds of people, read and responded to thousands of email requests, and participated in the many communities that arose worldwide.

Well, now it’s time to respond. We’ll be building upon what we have learned and go deep for a while. Expect regular, iterative releases over the next 90 days. I’ll post our thoughts throughout and be interested in hearing yours.

So, if you are inclined head over to Winksite to see what’s brewing. Some of what we are up to will be immediately clear, while other aspects will be apparent over time.

And, while we promise not to break anything you’ll notice in the short term a bit of the old mixed with the new.

So it begins. Again.

Winksite makes it easy to publish mobile Internet sites and build simple social connections via mobile phones. Over two billion people have a mobile phone, making it the world’s most popular interactive medium. Worldwide, people are not just talking into their phones but reading from them and typing into them.

More mobile phones than PCs are connected to the Internet, but the connections are needlessly complex. Each mobile carrier, each brand of phone, and sometimes each model, place a heavy technical burden on mobile publishers. What if Yahoo had to re-do its web site for Dell, HP, Apple, and others — with modifications based on whether Internet connection is Comcast cable, AT&T DSL, or T-Mobile Wi-Fi? That’s exactly what Yahoo endures on the mobile Internet for Nokia, Motorola, Cingular, and Verizon Wireless.

All this complexity confuses people, yet people are the mobile Internet’s killer app. Mobile phones are personal. They rest in your pocket, not on your desk.

So far, most of the mobile Internet looks like AOL in 1995 — email, chat, and simple games are available via constrained, proprietary interfaces. Struggling to maintain their walled gardens, mobile carriers keep the standards-based mobile Internet at arms-length and make life too hard for mobile users. The carriers are in a rush to sell us mobile video and location-based services, but they don’t provide the ability to build a simple mobile homepage or social profile.

Winksite does. Take five minutes to register and get your basic mobile site and profile launched. Take five more to add your blog, photos, news, or a chat room to your mobile site. Point friends, old and new, to your site via their phones or even their web browser. We’ll make you look good no matter what.

Join Winksite’s quarter million monthly users in 150 countries in the first, simple, concrete steps to making the mobile Internet open and universally accessible.