Freezer Meal Frenzy’s Growing Pains (And How We’re Dealing with Them)

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Four million. That’s how many pageviews Freezer Meal Frenzy has gotten thus far.

Back when we started this site in 2016, we never imagined we’d see the day when our pageview count would be in the millions, yet here were are. We really started reviewing frozen burritos just for the fun of it, and then decided to throw other frozen foods into the mix as well. One thing led to another, and our traffic wouldn’t stop growing. We took this as a sign that we were on the right path, so we kept going.

However, because we never planned to get this big, we’d established the site on the most budget-friendly server we could find. And we’ve long outgrown this server, but we kept going anyway. You may have noticed some site downtime, or slow loading times, as a result.

We’re not complaining. Too much traffic is the best possible problem a website can have. It just requires a shift in strategy — mostly on the technical side of things.

Back in July, we started making plans to migrate the site to a faster, beefier server that would suit our ever-growing needs. We’ve since found a host server that we really like, and we’re excited to make the move, but it’s taking a bit of work — work that has been keeping us away from writing frozen food reviews. We do apologize for the lack of fresh content lately, but we also promise the wait will be worth it. According to our initial tests, we should expect much faster load times, which means a better overall experience for our readers for years to come.

We hope to be on the new cloud server in the beginning of October, 2021. Note that our URL won’t change; we’ll still be right here at freezermealfrenzy.com.

In the meantime, we probably won’t be posting much, but know that we’re still very much here, and we’re working hard to make the transition as smooth as possible.

And on that note, you might have noticed a change in our comments system. We’d been using the Disqus platform for our comments, and we’ve grown more and more dissatisfied as the years went by. On top of showing extra saucy ads (which we don’t get paid for), the service doesn’t seem to be as secure as was initially promised. We decided to break from Disqus entirely.

We began to take steps to import all of the comments from the Disqus platform into the new comment system, but we were told the process would only save the past year of comments. Because we were already going to lose four years worth of comments, we decided to save the effort and just do a clean comment wipe. In the process, we lost hundreds of comments. While we do feel sad about that, we also know the site has a bright future, and we’ve already seen people using the new comment system.

So if you left comments using the Disqus system in the past, we apologize for losing those passionately typed conversations. We promise that we did read every single one of them over the years, and even if we didn’t respond personally, know that your voice was heard.

And to get back to the content migration, the only data lost is user comments. We’re working to make sure all of our 1,600+ reviews are preserved on the new server before we officially turn out the lights at the old server. We might have an hour or two of downtime while we make the shift officially, but we are hoping to make this transition as smooth — and as unnoticeable — as possible.

All that said, we’ve been working hard, and we can’t wait to get back to doing what we love best — reviewing frozen food every day of the week. We want to thank all of our readers for the continued support, and we look forward to having a faster, more stable website for you to read!

See you in October!

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Stuart
2 years ago

Congratulations guys! What a milestone! Good luck on your server migration work, they’re really tricky things to pull off smoothly – glad you found a reliable and good host to work with there. Looking to forward to reading more and more of your fab reviews 🙂

Freezer Meal Frenzy
2 years ago
Reply to  Stuart

Thank you for the comment!

We currently own six sites, and one of them was coming off of a possibly corrupted database (it wasn’t FMF), so the migration process has been a little bumpy. But the part that’s taking the most time is doing a full site QA check to make sure every post and every image survived the journey to the new server.

We’re really excited to get back to the review writing part of FMF! We’d much rather be doing that than meticulously going through the site one article at a time and testing it all (but that work must be done, so we’re doing it).

Fein Dining
2 years ago

There is absolutely no reason to apologize whatsoever! We’ve been huge fans for years and you’ve made the internet a better place because of your existence. Back in the day, hardly anybody reviewed frozen food! FMF blazed the trail, and we’re super appreciative of everything that you have done and continue to do.

Freezer Meal Frenzy
2 years ago
Reply to  Fein Dining

Thank you for the comment! It swells our hearts with pride to read comments from people who love what we do!

Freezer Meal Frenzy
2 years ago

Update: Our initial plan was to begin posting on October 5, but we hit a bit of a snag in the migration process. Our new go date is October 11. Thanks for the patience, everyone!

Rhonda
Rhonda
2 years ago

I miss your reviews. Can’t wait to start reading them soon again. Now that I can see the most recent older ones with pics I will be rereading those. Thanks for your great site!

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