Vijay has completed an overhaul of the new control panel visual styles and is uploading it today. Ananth has tackled a number of bugs with only a few left to go before we remove the "Beta" from the URL as Michael mentions below.

Many sites are starting to become busy and popular - which is terrific. We all live for such things. If you have a popular site or are planning on your site becoming incredibly busy plan this into your site from the beginning. Many people use Microsoft Access with ASP. Access and ASP are great for quickly developing a web application without having to be a super developer. And for the first few months or first few visitors this is fine. Access is designed to handle up to 256 reads and 1 write at any one time. If you read and write to your access DB a lot after a few hundred users it will start to struggle. And when your site starts to struggle, Access and ASP take over and lock up memory and handles on the server effectively bringing the server to a halt. The weak area of ASP and Access is when people do not close database objects within their code - leaving these open use up memory and resources adding to a halt of the server.

Adding expensive hardware, balancing sites to 1 per server and the like only costs money and will still not solve the problem. Such problems are within the web application code and the database choice. When we find sites like this we can only suggest they are migrated to SQL Server which is designed to handle thousands of concurrent connections and activity. Access is a small office single user database. SQL Server is a multi user, wide area network database.

This time of year as sites become busy is the time we come across sites with what we regard as bad code. Most of this bad code we find is with sites with Access Databases (great for small sites of less than 200 sessions a day) or poorly written SQL statements. If you want to ensure your site will run and perform well look at these two areas of your web application. We support SQL Server databases in the SME-Kit and higher.

I will talk to Priyanka our Chief Webhelper to track down some articles and information in relation to developing scaleable web sites and migrating to SQL Server from Access and put a special section in the Help Area of the new control panel.