YouVersion

Phase one of YouVersion’s scaling process was completed a little over a week ago. It involved both hardware and software upgrades to help handle the increased traffic from both website visitors and mobile application users. You can read more about that process here, but we’re already seeing drastic improvements in up-time and reliability.

While the engineering side of YouVersion’s scaling was under way, we quietly started a project to scale our support infrastructure to better serve the millions of new users that are being added to the YouVersion community. With YouVersion adding more than 10,000 new users every day, it was apparent that our former support setup wasn’t going to work.

Nearing the end of 2009, we set out to overhaul our user support infrastructure so that it could scale to serve tens of millions of users efficiently and effectively.

First, we moved from GetSatisfaction to Zendesk (http://support.youversion.com). Zendesk allows us to support users one-on-one through a private ticketing system while maintaining an open forum environment where the YouVersion community can help each other find answers. Second, we assigned a single person to be responsible for ongoing support. This doesn’t mean that one person has to answer every support request. Rather, this person is responsible for making sure the YouVersion community is cared for, heard, and helped. It’s more of a leadership role than a “customer service representative” role.

The most important change has been who supports the YouVersion community. While we have a dedicated support manager to guide and lead in this area, we’re going to start leaning on volunteers to provide answers and troubleshoot problems for other YouVersion users. The volunteers we’re trusting with this role are handpicked to join this team; the YouVersion Community Champions.

If you’re interested in being a YouVersion Community Champion, here’s what we’re looking for:

– Used YouVersion for at least 4 months on a very regular basis
– Very familiar with the main website and at least one YouVersion mobile application
– Displayed the ability and willingness to meaningfully help other YouVersion users in the public support forums by answering questions or providing guidance

We’re excited about how this new approach to user support will provide value to the entire YouVersion community. If you’d like to know more about volunteering for YouVersion support or in other areas, go to http://goo.gl/9CkB. If you’d like to sign up immediately, go to http://goo.gl/XixQ.

With the new system in place, we’re confident that we’ll be able to continue to effectively support the ballooning YouVersion user-base as it grows into the tens of millions. And what’s more, we’re prepared to make constant adjustments and improvements as necessary to make sure the YouVersion community is always well cared for.

In our continued efforts to keep up with the growth of YouVersion in recent months, we’re scheduling some downtime tomorrow morning to spend some time upgrading our hardware. YouVersion will be down for an hour (or less) between 9am and noon CST. We’ll post from the @YouVersion Twitter account when maintenance begins and again when we’re finished.

Sorry for the inconvenience. We promise to work as quickly as possible.

For the past few weeks our team has been focused on bringing stability and reliability to the YouVersion infrastructure. You can read a few posts about the process here and here. I am pleased to announce we have completed the first phase of that process, and had a very successful and stable weekend…more here and here.

As you are aware, YouVersion is growing at an amazing rate – over 1/2 million new mobile users added in the last 30 days, and over 250,000 new registered web users this month alone! We are not seeing growth slow down, so we are also preparing for continual scaling (phase 2, 3, etc.) to be able to handle the additional users.

Finally, with all this scaling and infrastructure talk you might be thinking we have stopped ongoing development…well, that is not the case! Look for some fun and exciting releases and announcements in the coming weeks.

As you may know, YouVersion grew by leaps and bounds in 2009, and 2010 is already shaping up to be a record-setting year for Scripture engagement on the web and on mobile phones. January is on track to see more new accounts, more new Bible app downloads, more YouVersion.com unique views, and more time reading the Bible than we’ve ever seen before.

But with growth comes the challenge of scaling to accommodate it. God has brought together an amazing team of talented developers and engineers that have made it their single focus to stabilize and expand YouVersion’s infrastructure to handle the current load and prepare it for the increasing demands of new user-accounts, hits, downloads, and minutes reading the Bible.

Today we completed the first phase of infrastructure expansion and you should already start to feel the increased speed and better up-time from the changes we’ve made so far. Continued server and code-base optimization will take place over the next several weeks with ongoing evaluations and tweaks throughout the year.

As a side note to these challenges and our response to them, the YouVersion team is incredibly thankful for our users. You’ve been patient, courteous, helpful, and encouraging through this phase of growth and we don’t take that for granted. We know that God has big plans for YouVersion in the coming months and years and we’re honored to partner with you to see His plans come full circle.

(As a reminder, if you have questions, problems, ideas, or praise for the YouVersion team, you can post them to our community forum at http://youversion.com/support.)

Over the past few months YouVersion has been growing at an explosive rate, and for that we thank you! Many of you might not realize, but in the last 30 days we have added over 1/2 million new mobile users to the iPhone, Blackberry and Android Bible application and that continues to grow. In addition to those new users, we are seeing significant growth in mobile web usage as well as traditional web usage of YouVersion.com. We are excited to see so many millions of people interacting regularly with Scripture.

However, with the great news of new users…and people being able to engage in Scripture, the reality is we have had a few rough days this month, specifically on Sundays. As we see huge amounts of people using the Bible Application our core server infrastructure has not been able to handle the peak load. What we want you as our users and partners to know is we are very sorry for this issue. We are highly committed to addressing these current problems, and building a solution that will have the capacity to handle millions and millions of new Bible users each month. We have already made some major changes and improvements this afternoon, as well as initiated a plan to triple our server infrastructure.

As challenging as these past few days have been…we are excited and encouraged about the future. The idea of reaching hundreds of millions if not billions of people with the power of God’s Word is unfolding as a reality! We thank you for partnering with us and ask for your continued prayers and support as we continue this exciting journey.