We are happy to announce that YGL can now provide you and your users with inexpensive credit reports to screen your applicants directly within the YGL system.  Price for each report is $4 (without credit score) and $6 (with credit score) flat.

The YGL credit report system should bring you additional convenience and better streamline the rental process.  It also gives you great control over how many reports are pulled and by who.

An approval process is required due to the sensitive nature of applicants’ credit reports.  Please contact us to sign up or ask any questions.

The YouGotListings system just changed looks.  The new looks match our current website design, and we believe is a step up from the previous design.  Please note that while the looks have changed, the general layout and functionality has not.

We also added the ability for you to personalize the colors in the system by choosing from a list of available color themes (Default, Blue, Gold, Green, Orange, Red).  Selecting a different theme will change the colors within the system.  You will find this setting from Dashboard -> My Profile, under the Account Settings section.

New Looks For Navigation and Search Bar

New Looks For The Listing Details Page

We are very excited to have finally released our new website today.  Our old site had very little information about our products and services.  The new website has much detailed information on what we do, how we do it and pricing.  Please browse around and give us any valuable feedback you may have.

There are a couple major pieces still missing from the new website.  We will continue to work on them and add them in the near future.  More importantly, in the coming week, we will be updating the YGL internal system to match the new look and feel.  We will also be making available some customizable themes (in case you don’t like our new look).  Stay tuned.

Lastly, we want to thank Ryan Kelleher for his great design.  We worked together many times with Ryan for our client’s websites.  This time on our own site, we worked very closely with Ryan to come up with the new design theme and custom artworks.  We would highly recommend him if you need an awesome designer.

Visit Ryan’s Website

Two weeks ago, our website became unstable and went down multiple times due to heavy load, particularly during lunch hours.   And for some of our clients who have a lot of data, searching became very slow.

We do take this very seriously and have been working non-stop since then to implement certain optimization measures.  Because we had to implement lots of system wide changes quickly to alleviate the pain, it caused the system to be buggy for the last 2 weeks.  At this time, we have mostly finished with the site optimizations, and fixed the majority of the bugs.  We apologize for the negative impact. We also thank you for being patient with us and helping us fix the bugs.

If you are curious, continue reading to find out what was the cause, what we have done to fix it, and what’s our long term strategy going forward.

What Caused The Slowness and System Downtime?

There are 3 main reasons that caused everything.

1.  For the most part, it was caused by our own growth.  We have been growing steadily since we started last February.  Each premium client we bring on-board, not only add many agents/brokers who use the system actively throughout the day, they also bring on much more traffic from perspective renters through their ads and company website and personal websites.

2.  PerfectUnits.com – We are now getting about 400 – 500 unique perspective renters a day searching for apartments.  The site was not designed very well originally to handle the load.  Not only was PerfectUnits.com became excruciatingly slow itself, it was also causing YGL to go down with it.

3.  Data Complexity – As we introduced more listing sharing capabilities between accounts, our data structure has grown ever more complex.  For example, for the same listing managed by a landlord, each agency / account has their own set of photos, descriptions, features and tags.  Each agent can also have their own descriptions and ads.  That’s a lot of copies of the same listing.

What Have We Done For The Last 2 Weeks To Solve The Problem?

We did 3 things to optimize the speed.

1.  Server Upgrade – We upgraded our server from a quad core with 4 gigs of ram to a 8 core with 8 gigs of ram.  A more powerful machine means we can handle more concurrent requests and processes. However, this was not nearly enough.  We have already passed the stage that we can just throw more hardware at the problem.

2.  Database Optimization – The YGL system is a very database intensive system.  Each search, each listing view are all hits to the database.  We were able to optimize our database queries to reduce load times.  You should see the listing searches being faster.

3.  Cache – Lastly and most importantly, we implemented a very complex caching system, which allows us to store commonly used items (like listings, comments, features, photos, leads) directly in memory, hence lightening the database load drastically.  This was fairly challenging and caused the majority of the bugs you might have experienced.

What’s The Long Term Plan?

With the current measures in place, it should last us comfortably through this season.  We’ll be continuously monitoring our system load. When necessary, we will employ multiple servers and load balancing.

Again, we apologize for the down time and the bugs that came with it, and thank you again for being patient with us.