The Cyclescape website is now running rather faster than before, thanks to a hardware upgrade completed today.

The change has seen the site move to a dedicated server. Previously, it was on a virtual machine on a server shared with one of the CycleStreets journey planner servers. The change was part of a larger set of moves being worked on over the coming two months being undertaken by us (CycleStreets, the organisation running Cyclescape). There has been a noticeable and much-needed performance boost.

For those of a technical bent, we have also taken the opportunity to resolve various other things:

• Upgraded the operating system
• Upgraded the webserving software and database software
• Removed old legacy references throughout the code dating from before the 'Cyclescape' name was chosen

Thanks to Andy, our developer, for some of the work to migrate the code to enable these various changes.

Part of the hosting upgrade cost has come from the Polden-Puckham grant.

The upgrade has been also contributed to by our hosts, Mythic Beasts, who have kindly waived the server management fee which helps ensure we run a professional and properly-monitored service. Naturally, the site hosting also has redundancy and regular backup. We remain grateful to our friends at Mythic Beasts for their support.