The story of Sitescore (and it’s back)

Many years ago Silktide released a free tool called Sitescore, which created free reports on any website. The tool was a huge success: actually, it was too successful.

A week after going live, we had 27,000 links pointing to us (mostly blogs), a year later over 1.8 million. Our site became more popular than the University of Nottingham in under 6 months, and that’s with zero offline marketing and five employees.

As popularity rose we were featured on media throughout the globe, from Canadian TV to Spanish radio. We had enquiries from FORTUNE companies about a commercial version, and it didn’t take long before we wrote one.

Unfortunately, the original free Sitescore was just a humble script we’d cobbled together in a week or two. It wasn’t designed to handle that much traffic, in fact, we didn’t even bother using analytics on it at first.  We were also a much smaller company back then, and Sitescore’s popularity was costing us more than we could afford, in time and hosting costs. So about a year after it launched, we had to shut it down.

We released another free Sitescore shortly (“Sitescore 2”) after, and unfortunately we got it wrong. We based it on the engine from our commercial version which was much better, but sadly not scalable enough for the general public. The same problem occurred, and we had to return to our drawing boards.

Over two years passed since the original Sitescore was shut down, and we’ve grown a lot. We had to rename Sitescore to SiteRay due to a trademark conflict (the name is too similar to Sitecore, a renowned CMS company). SiteRay is now on version 3 and we have over 400 paying customers.

And so it came time to write a new, free Sitescore. We called it Nibbler (“take a taste of your website”).

We had learnt the hard way not to underestimate demand, so we redesigned everything from the ground up to handle huge volumes of traffic which could ramp up quickly. We decided to base Nibbler on Amazon’s Cloud technology, which means we don’t even need our own physical servers – we just rent computing power from Amazon. Using the cloud means we increase our capacity at any time, automatically, and then reduce it again when demand subsides. Previously we’d have to wake up in the night and start shopping around for biggest, faster servers.

Nibbler is only in alpha right now, which means there’s loads of broken or incomplete stuff we know about, but we think some people will still find it useful. We have a team working on developing it constantly, and there’s a lot planned over the coming months.

Take a look and let us know what you think. We’ll be keeping this blog updated with stories of our new adventures as they happen.