When I relaunched The Loop in September 2011, I offered readers the opportunity to become a member of the site. With your $3 monthly membership you got access to a full text RSS feed, but mostly, you helped offset the cost of running the Web site. I thought it was time to let you know where that money is going.

Thanks to the membership payments, The Loop is running on brand new cloud servers. Over the past month or so I tried a few of the big name server companies, but they didn’t work out very well. Finally, I found CleverKite, a startup cloud server company with very reasonable prices and great equipment.

The Loop now runs on SSD-equipped servers, so any bottleneck with hard drives is virtually eliminated. Speed has become an increasingly important feature for me and being able to deliver that to the readers is paramount.

Back in October, when Apple held its iPhone 4S event, the traffic on the dedicated Web server I had at Liquid Web was too much for it to handle. Within minutes of the event starting, my server went down and stayed down for much of the event. Unfortunately, Liquid Web could offer no solution to the problem.

I left the event, angry and frustrated, vowing to never let that happen to me or you again. I believe I’ve found the solution.

The page load times for The Loop before September 1, when the site design changed, were in the 10-15 second range. After the site changed, page load times dropped to about 3-5 seconds (in the US). While good, it wasn’t good enough.

With CleverKite and the use of world-class CDNs around the world, I now measure page load times in milliseconds.

In North America, pages load in under a second. While Europe, Australia and Asia take a little longer, after a couple of weeks of testing, pages are being delivered in under 2 seconds to those regions as well.

Between the servers, CDNs, optimized coding and of course, the help of reader’s membership money, The Loop is more stable and faster than it has ever been.

Peter and I are committed to bringing you the most interesting content we can, everyday. We appreciate your support in helping us pay for everything, reading the site and sharing with your friends.

Never doubt how much your $3 can help.