Phish.net now has a its own dedicated servers in a data center, hosted by End Point Corporation.

After the Hampton reunion last year, the Mockingbird Foundation, with IT director Adam Scheinberg (@sethadam1) at the helm, decided to build a new database-driven website to update the static "billboard" of text setlists of the Phish.net archival site, which had operated pretty much unchanged from 1994.

The site architecture of Phish "setlists" hosted at Phish.net is now a huge relational (MySQL) database that connects the showdates, songs, venues and individual site users to provide not only instant information on all 1,504 Phish shows by date and the 814 songs Phish has played at those shows, but users' own personal "stats" and "gaps charts". Phish.net was also built with an open API architecture so it could "feed" information from its setlist databases to many other phan sites, and its "smartphone" mobile site, m.phish.net.

After months in beta, and through 2010, Phish.net has grown to over 10,000 registered users, many of whom participate in a lively relaunched community discussion forum and have added "their" shows to their profiles and stats "seedfiles".

During the recent late Fall tour and Halloween run, Phish.net on its former "virtual" (shared) server began to fail under the load of more than 20,000 fans trying to get setlist information at the same time, and the server was repeatedly "crashing" under the loads. With our new dedicated servers, this will not happen, and Phish.net can now accommodate almost unlimited traffic and growth for years to come.

If you haven't checked out the new Phish.net site, especially the information you can get about any song by clicking on the link (history, lyrics stats) or the smartphone optimized site at m.phish.net or the discussion forum or blog, check them out and you will be pleasantly surprised by all the new, cool stuff there.

If you liked this blog post, one way you could "like" it is to make a donation to The Mockingbird Foundation, the sponsor of Phish.net. Support music education for children, and you just might change the world.