100,000 NektoMe Users

Today, the number of registered users of NektoMe has exceeded 100 thousand people!
We came to this relatively quickly - in just 5 months, but the path we went through was not easy.
I want to tell you a little about how we are expanding.

I will start with information about the placement.
The first month we sat at the maximum rate of FirstVDS.ru, but it quickly became lacking.
Next, we moved to Clodo.ru and lasted there for about four months.
There were two problems - disc brakes [WA stably high] and falls, of course.
Moving to their new vaunted file system didn't help either. The brakes remained.
Finally, recently, we moved to a good dedicated server with SAS disks.
The site began to fly, and the financial expense, you won’t believe it, is the same as on Claude!
Also, to reduce the load on the disk, we stopped storing more than 1000 files in one folder.
For example, a month ago, a folder with avatars contained more than 140 thousand pictures!
In general, it used to be /ava/2034.jpg , now it has become /ava/2/034.jpg

About building functionality.
We started as a service of anonymous comments.
Easy registration, no unnecessary information - you get a page and throw it in the social. network.
The service was just an addition to social networks. You could even say a toy.

Then we added blogs and photos. It's so great when all the people you know can talk without masks about your personality, appearance, your brilliant blog posts.
Criticism helps us get better.
In the first month, users wrote 4,000 blog entries and uploaded 11,000 photos (single-piece upload, 30 photos per user limit).

And as soon as we launched friends and messages, in a day on the site 1500 social contacts were recorded (additions to friends)! Page views increased by 30%.
By default, friends are hidden. You can add no more than 100 friends.

About the messaging system
In early May, we began to develop a conversation system with the ability to add up to 7 friends.
Imagine our surprise when VKontakte announced a similar feature on June 2nd.
Moreover, they launched it back in mid-May, just announced later.
I had a shock. 4 years did not move, and then as soon as we started it, they start.
Remodeling the architecture was already expensive and we still launched our system of group conversations.
Works on files. This is something similar to leproinbox, only in a more nimble version.

We also added just such an ajax panel that turns green when there are new messages.


About competition
When we first started, I, of course, was afraid of the emergence of direct competitors.
Anonymous questions services already existed, but we launched the anonymous opinions service first.
Surprisingly, during these 5 months no one has created a service similar to ours.
New services for anonymous issues appear. Clones of foreign services appear .
And nobody climbs into the niche of anonymous opinions. It turns out that there is competition, but inferior.
It's a pity. Competitors are one of the best incentives to help develop well.

Growth chart


Ege gay, we did it! In less than six months we have made a popular project, which is
already among the thirty most visited projects of this subject in Runet .

Now I’m not ashamed to invite you to join ,% username%.

PS He is waiting for your opinions !