It’s not exactly crazy, but enough people have signed up for OurAirports that I’ve had to do a large amount of emergency coding to keep the site running at an acceptable speed — it’s hosted on a shared cluster (Mosso), a new-fangled kind of service which creates some pretty strange issues around database table writes and locking compared to running on a single host, and you don’t see the problems until a lot of people are trying to do things at the same time. If the site was too slow when you first visited, you might want to take a second look and see if it’s better.
XingR’s notes from a lifetime of flying
Enough tech talk. You’re here to read about flying, and whether you’re a new student or a 20,000-hour airline pilot, I think you’ll enjoy reading the beautiful comments — mini-essays, really — that OurAirports member XingR has been contributing about his lifetime spent in and around airports on several continents, both in civilian life and through a long military career (he’s currently living near Clark Intl, the former huge U.S. military base in the Phillipines). You can read all of XingR’s comments (in reverse order) on his comments page, and follow the links to see the airports. Thanks, XingR.
Land and Hold Short 
Hey… I’m still getting quite a few:
“No suitable nodes are available to serve your request.” errors. š¦
Me too. I’m moving the site from Mosso to a dedicated server, but it will take a couple of days. In the meantime, thanks to everyone for your patience.
There are two main things to worry about when you invest time and resources in an internet service.
It will be a flop, and no one will come.
Or it will be a success and the server(s) will grumble and cause sleepless nights.
Of the two the latter is probably the much preferable, but it may not feel that way at the time.
Be of good cheer, I’m sure it will sort itself out before long and I think the concept is neat, I hope a lot of other people do too.
Thanks, XingR. You’re right — it’s better to be too busy than to be sitting around wondering where the visitors are. The site’s already up to 108 comments (and hundreds of airports marked visited), which isn’t bad for the first 24 hours after low-key launch on a dodgy server. The hardest part is switching my brain back to my paid consulting work for my customers, or even switching it off to sleep.
I’ve moved the site to a new server, and it seems very fast now.
Excellent site. I’ve just updated my profile to include all 50 of my airports (wow, in less than 3 years!). Great effort. I’ve also placed a posting on several aviation forums to see if I can help drum up some visits for you.
Anthony