Formerly ImprezaWRXSTi.com, IWSTI is the largest Subaru STI community on the internet. With nearly 1.5 million user posts, this forum ranks in the top 1000 of the largest forums in the world.
In April of 2005, the owners of IWSTI had us move their entire website, forums, and database from a shared hosting account to a RealityDesign dedicated server. During the move, they also had us upgrade the forums from phpBB to vBulletin and customize and skin their new vBulletin software. Working around the clock, the entire server transfer and upgrade took less than 8 hours and occurred while most people were sleeping.
Thanks to their new dedicated hosting and superior forum software, IWSTI had lots of room to grow. In fact, just a year later the forum member base had tripled in size and the website traffic and posts increased nearly 10-fold. Around this time IWSTI hired us again to freshen up the look of their site and create a portal-like home page for their users. The new home page consisted of recent forum topics, promotional items for sale (such as stickers, t-shirts, etc.), the latest vendor deals, Subaru-related news stories, and pictures from their member gallery.
In May of 2007, it was time for yet another upgrade. A new, more powerful dedicated server would be needed to facilitate the expected growth for the next year as IWSTI was heading towards 50,000 registered users. This upgrade was much more straightforward as IWSTI was already on the RealityDesign network. The entire upgrade process took under 2 hours and was conducted from 2AM to 4AM to minimize the effective down time.
Click here to visit this project.
Company: HSPN Networks, LLC
Database(s): MySQL
Language(s): PHP, CSS
Software: Customized vBulletin
Hosting: RealityDesign dedicated servers
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