The bad news: 

- I thought user activity would ramp up slowly enough for me to have time optimizing things, but we went from pretty much 0 users to 550 concurrent users within a few days.
- The code that runs this website is highly ad-hoc and inefficient because I just wanted to get something up that works. It's one of the reasons that error page pops up.

The good news:

- As inefficient as my code is, it's still pretty fast, and newguild is running on a server that's a fraction as powerful as the oldguild server at a fraction of the cost with software that's not too far off from the feature-set of vBulletin. (Though some big features still remain)
- Despite the intermittent bursts of down time, it's doing a pretty good job handling a similar activity volume as oldguild.
- Since the code is scrappy, it means there's a lot of room for improvement.

I might double the size of the server (which would still cost less than half of what I was paying before) so that I have more room to work on things beyond performance issues.

I'm currently working on the subscription feature and a password reset function.