[Kirby]

As you may have noticed, the service is not operating at this time. With over ten thousand users, this service was getting more than six hits every second! That is some insane demand on the server. This service was initially designed to be used a few people (it runs on only a 900 MHz computer with a single network card), but it soon became very popular and we had an explosion of users. In one day, we had over three hundred people sign up. Google was immediately crawling the site, sometimes twice daily, and it was listed as the second result for the query "whatpulse". Pretty cool, but pretty demanding.

One nice thing about the website was the small amount of revenue it generated. I thought that I could run the service as-is, and then eventually (maybe after six months or so) I would have enough money to start upgrading the signature image server machine. However, when the service hit critical mass during the third week of September 2004, that dream was gone. No matter how much bandwidth I provide, ten thousand people cannot access a slow server with only one network card all at once.

So, at this point I am looking for ways to redesign this service -- ways to reduce the amount of resources that the signature image script requires. I know how this project has taken several web communities by storm, and there are many WhatPulse users out there who enjoyed it. That's why I made it in the first place -- I wanted a stylish but customizable signature image to display my WhatPulse stats. In other words, I want to restore this service. I don't know how long it will take or what changes it will require, but it will come back sometime.

don't stop pulsing, but I guess it's safe to say that you can free up your signature for the meantime....