Panda-Media

Crooks and Liars

Crooks and Liars is an American liberal blog, which was founded in August of 2004, during the 2004 Presidential election, by John Amato. It was the first video style blog around, starting in a pre-YouTube era. Crooks and Liars has a team of about a dozen volunteers, including administrators, contributors and moderators.   Crooks and Liars has grown immensely since its birth, now averaging  over 230,000 unique visitors per day and over 330,000 page impressions.

Evolution

Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.

As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.

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