February 2025

The cart is fixed! It was down all of Tuesday the 12th due to a mistake on my part! Oops! I’m so glad I checked the site before going to bed! You could add items to the cart and they would not appear in the cart AT ALL!

I was making some slight changes to the web server. Installed a new control panel  and activated Varnish cache. Apparently it breaks the shopping cart! I deactivated that and now everything is fine.

I’m now using a fully dedicated CPU on our VPS instead of a shared one. I barely used 10% on the shared CPU and it’s not likely I needed to upgrade it, but it doesn’t hurt. 22K products in a database sure does eat up a lot of RAM!

If you could believe it, our first web server back in the early days was a fully dedicated server with only a 2ghz Celeron CPU with 80gb of merchanical hard drive space and 512mb of RAM!! They definitely overcharged us for it. I was also paying like $30/month for years for the Plesk control panel. I no longer use it, but the cheapest edition is worth every penny. It’s down to $13 I think.

The site now is faster than ever! I remember the days on my old web server and even with HTML and CSS only we could barely get under a TTFB (Time to first byte) of 190ms. Now it’s often down to 60ms!! We use Nginx and a pretty great caching software called Flying Press. It even works without messing with the shopping cart function. That’s not a common feature it seems like.

You know what’s super annoying these days when managing your own web server for a site? A massive ton of AI BOTS! I block them all! I never realize how much of a problem they are until recently. They supposedly do “training” on every site they visit.

Top 77 on our home page or on the February 2025 updates page. Lots with Rara Kudou, who people seem to like a lot.

Every single one of them probably came out in the past week in Japan. Some are so new you can barely find DVD covers for them online!

In February alone i’ve added 239 DVDs already and it’s only the 6th! We also probably hit a record number of new JAV DVDs added in January! And it most definitely wasn’t quantity over quality!

Tough month as usual, but i’m working so hard. Every single day I focus only on the site and processing orders. It’s a real challenge to run this site some months. This is definitely one of them. I hope I can make it through the month without taking a part time job. Working for this site is a full time job and then some!

To help encourage customers to order, i’m trying something new. I’ve reduced the shipping price slightly as a test.

I also upgraded the web server to be even faster. Upgraded it from 4GB of ram to 8GB. Two core CPU to 3. Will it make a difference? Possibly not, but that’s OK! It doesn’t hurt. We barely use more than 10% CPU as it is.

I also removed all page caching. That could have caused some issues with people ordering. It’s unlikely, but possible. My old caching software (Flying Press) was supposedly working ok with my E-commerce software.

I also found out a bizzare configuration error with the site. My WordPress install was set to use a maximum of 2048MB of ram, when it was supposed to be set at the default of like 256MB! I doubt it caused any issues, but it’s possible.