LUCERNE – Increased site traffic has once again prompted a server upgrade for www.lakeconews.com, making this the second major upgrade for the online publication.

The site is moving to a dedicated server with dedicated bandwidth, memory allocation and processors to accommodate the demands of its growing readership.

The upgrade comes in advance of a planned upgrade scheduled for February or March, 2008.

The previous shared hosting arrangement was working fine on an enterprise-level server until the site host notified the news organization that its Web site's consumption of server resources was affecting the performance of other Web sites on the server.

In fact, www.lakeconews.com was utilizing 25 times the norm of allocated database resources, in part due to readership and also partially because of the site's large archive of news stories. That situation resulted in site services being suspended for short periods on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The situation is being rectified with the deployment of the new server. The increased cost of hosting www.lakeconews.com is funded by Larson New Media using subscriber payments.

Larson New Media President Elizabeth Larson said that the migration to a dedicated server sends two messages.

“The fact that we have to do this, and that we can afford to thanks to subscription fees, proves that this new community media model really does work,” said Larson. “The other positive is that the readership is rapidly growing and will be able to continue to grow with the enhanced infrastructure."

The server upgrade is scheduled to take place in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving day. As a result, readers may notice some issues with site performance.

Lake County News thanks its readers for their patience during the transition.

Larson New Media, founded and based in Lucerne, is the parent company of www.lakeconews.com. The company was created to pursue hyperlocal, high quality journalism for the Lake County community.

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