The Ad Free Cloud

Why did we have in app ads in the first place?  It costs us an incredible amount of money to maintain the 1337pwn.com server farm.  You can't support over 3 million gamers on a hobbyist setup and while Microsoft is very supportive, they do not permit us to cover the cost through sales of XBOX Live applications.

Earlier this year, we had hit a wall at 1337pwn.com.  You might have noticed frequent outages back in February and March.  During peak evening hours, applications had become slow and unresponsive -- our server farm could no longer meet the demands of the community and ad revenues were not substantial enough to expand. The size of the community had grown to where it was no longer fiscally viable to support it.

Back in March/April, we began the process of re-engineering the back end to take advantage of emerging cloud based hosting services.  After some testing and experimentation, we decided to utilize Google App Engine to power a completely new back end for 1337pwn.com.  

Google was very supportive of our efforts -- our Android XBOX Live Friends is quite popular.   When we ran into challenges, Google provided invaluable help to ensure that we were successful.  In recognition of this assistance, we moved our Android users to the new cloud-based 1337pwn.com first. With that act, the 1337pwn.com application became the first third-party application to utilize both Google's mobile and cloud platform.  We're proud of that!

The Android users helped us work out the kinks with the new cloud-based services.  Dashboard widget users can start using it today.  In the coming weeks, iPhone and iPod Touch users will experience the improved performance and reliability of our cloud-based infrastructure. Look for the 2.0 versions of both applications to be approved by Apple soon.

Now that we're "running on Google", we don't have to worry about spikes in usage and slowness.  The cloud scales in a manner simply not possible with any server farm that 1337pwn.com could afford. We can now confidently add support for new devices like Palm Pre, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile without the fear of "can the servers take it".

The team at 1337pwn.com appreciates your patience as we've been making these changes and looks forward to sharing with you the applications made possible by our new back-end.

Thank you!