At the end of each year, we like to look back and discuss some of the significant changes that happened to our service and this year we focused heavily on our physical infrastructure.

We started early on April 14th by introducing QUASAR and PULSAR, which are our first South Asian server nodes.

These servers were very important because until this time all the traffic that originated in Asia was being served by our European infrastructure which introduced higher-than-desired latency. We had trialled many different servers from many different hosting providers and datacenters until we settled on these and over the past 8 months they've worked diligently.

We followed this up just four days later on April 18th with the first major refresh of our American infrastructure. We swapped out our LETO node for LUNAR. This increased performance and set a new benchmark for our servers in the North American region going forward.

Then eight days after that on April 26th we introduced both SATURN and JUPITER as new North American nodes. This time we didn't replace any current nodes for that region as we had long-term leases on our other older servers so we kept CRONUS, METIS and NYX until between July and September, all of those older servers are now retired.

These three new North American nodes increased our performance so much that we reduced our footprint from four servers to three while more than quadrupling our per-second request capacity.

And with that final hardware update, we were now running the latest and fastest hardware in all regions and that gave us the confidence to increase our query limits from 125 requests per second to 200 requests per second per node and per customer in all regions.

Of course, other changes happened in supporting of our physical architecture, we re-designed the way our servers share and correlate database updates which made features like our new stats graph with per-minute resolution possible. We made some blog posts about both of those things, we also were able to lower our average query latency which gave us an extra buffer to introduce more data to the API like currencies and more detailed and accurate location data.

As we close out the year, the main thing that happened this year that makes me personally happy is our South Asian server nodes. It's no secret if you have followed the blog for the past several years that we have been trying to get servers in Asia that had the network connectivity we needed, the processing power we required and a price that made sense. So being able to finally reach that goal with hardware that will last us many years was a great achievement.

I also want to give one shout-out to the power user improvements we made this year, not only the new high-resolution stats graph already mentioned above but also making Custom Rules and Custom Lists fully searchable. Such a simple concept but it works so well and saves so much time, especially for our most heavy users who have a lot of content in their dashboards.

Thank you to everyone who uses our services for a wonderful 2023, we're looking forward to what 2024 brings!