That Crack is my first application site, originally built in 2007 , it has now went through enough changes to finally be back online and without fault. Originially the site was built using a Esyndicat, a community link exhange program intended for peeps to share links and places of interest,i built on top of it to diplay mixtape cover art and play tracks using a home built flash player.
The first stages of the site built was simple, and the owners would originally upload via ftp. The players were then later built, which seemed to bring in the most traffic. The players were a pain, and a all night adventure. I think it took me four days to make the structure of the player, but it took me a couple weeks to make it skinnable, which still wasn’t that great of a feature. The way the players are made, i wished i would have done it differently after i was done – but as is life.
About three months ago, we felt our first effects of growth – disk space. Each mixtape is about 180 megs, plus a zip of the entire tape, basicly doubling the size. Before that, the company that was our dedicated host providor was going through some serious changes and possiple bankrupcy – so we tried to move to another host. After the new host failed us multiple times, we found out the employees of the last host company were going to be creating a new company and allowing the old customers to continue with them. So we stayd put ( after we practicly moved ). Then we started to run out of room – and after many attempts to move or get a bigger hard drive, we finally hooked it up with a san drive. Now the room issue is gone. No more space limits 
So since we were moving to a new space, we decided to get the site off of Esyndicat. Esyndicat, though seemingly a strong application, still posed a lot of speed issues. Our site started to experience 15k + visitors a day around August of last year, and it never seemed to go past that point. I can’t really say for sure, but at that point, and with the little experience i have, i had to assume the code or the sites system was slowing down visitors. So getting off of Esyndicat was always a thought.
Around the same time i was realizing Esyndicats limitations, i was getting into wordpress.
So now we have moved the site into wordpress – its much faster. Not only does it serves its mixtapes from the san, it also dosen’t have much crappy code in the way – you can see the site set up and turn on much quicker then before.
We are also able to keep track of the songs and players much better – and the possibility to allow video listings, as well as news and blogs ( who knows – this is unofficial stuff ). There is a top Downloaded, Listined section – as well as a Top Posted , which is gauged on how many times a player is embeded else where on the net and if its been active in the time period stated ( the side bar shows last week, the other section right now is set to a month ). We wil be setting up a all-time list as well. Like Tina says ‘The more you grind, the more you shine’
The next thing on the list is new players with a online skin editor!
Peace
