Its been a while since we have had an update here on PollDaddy.com. I would just like to tell you about some of the projects we have been working on over the past few months. As you know we were acquired by Automattic last October, and since then we have been integrating with the Automattic team and working on integrating with WordPress through our new PollDaddy Plugin.

From a technical point of view we have had a lot of scaling issues from time to time as we have grown in traffic and users. We started out with one server and have gone through various expansions since. PollDaddy.com was originally (and currently is) built on the Microsoft .NET and SQL Server platforms. Although this system was very powerful and met with all of our needs, over time as we had to add more and more servers and licensing costs would have become prohibitively expensive. We have run a tight ship financially and with over 99% of our users on free accounts, in order to continue to provide the kind of service we wanted to, we needed a new plan.

Our new owners Automattic run over 1,000 Linux based servers at present, but unfortunately we could not utilize any of this hardware with our current setup. So, along with their technical team we came up with a plan to migrate all of our code and database to run on open platforms based around the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

For the past 3 months we have been hard at work migrating all of our code and data and are now coming to the end of that phase. Actually PollDaddy Answers is the first site we have launched like this and now runs much faster with increased stability. We will be rolling out the rest of our sites on this new platform over the next 2-3 weeks which means you will see a big increase in speed overall.

As soon as we have all of that done we will be getting to work on a complete redesign of PollDaddy.com. We have a great team of UI and design people at our disposable now. They are currently looking over your suggestions for improving the format of PollDaddy that you have kindly contributed over the past few month. If you have any ideas you would like to share with us the please contact us directly and we will take your suggestions on board.

In summary we have been working hard on the code and systems at the heart of PollDaddy in order to have a solid foundation to build all of the really great features you have been asking for. We will have updates on all of this soon and will be launching our new site over the coming weeks.

Please keep in touch with support in the mean time and let us know what you are thinking!

Lenny

PollDaddy.com