A New Home for Package Tracking: Boxoh.com
25 November 2008 | By Ian in Development, Google, Hobbies, Made by isnoop, PHP, Related sites, Site Features
My Google maps making, RSS feed slinging, universal package tracker has moved to greener pastures. Boxoh.com is your new go-to place for tracking UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Airborne packages.
Backstory: In 2006, I posted a handy new utility I’d cobbled together which was a mashup between package tracking for for multiple services. It quickly became by far the most popular page on this site, with more than 1.4 million tracking requests last month. It gets more than three times the traffic of my movie theater RSS generator and four times the traffic of another spinoff site, FeedSifter, a simple RSS/Atom feed filter.
If you are familiar with MediaTemple’s GridServer service, you’ll know that using up all 1000 GPUs (server work units) for the past several months is not a good thing. Those cycles weren’t just going to waste on poorly written scripts, either. Each hit to the tracker consumed an average of 0.0002 GPU (WordPress uses 8 to 16 times that with each hit). It wasn’t always this way, though. Check back soon for an upcoming post on how I managed to cut down the CPU usage of the package tracker by 90% with some intelligent code analysis and a creative caching solution.
Boxoh.com is now hosted on a screaming VPS server with plenty of spare power. I’m taking full advantage of APC caching and several other behind-the-scenes tweaks one can only get a grip on when they are running a dedicated server.
Thanks to all of the people who have made the service so popular!
Also, thanks to Juplex for a fast and friendly site design!
26 November 2008 | The Dave Said:
First off, thanks for such an awesome service!
The “Terms” and “Contacts” words at the bottom look oddly like they should be links, but aren’t.
Also, any chance you can add Canada Post?
Either way, thanks muchly!
26 November 2008 | MrPaul Said:
I like the new site. Thanks alot for hosting this for us. Hopefully you’ll make a small fortune from ads.
26 November 2008 | j2 Said:
This is still both good and awesome, and the design and convenience of a direct URL makes it even better! High fives to you!
26 November 2008 | Kent Said:
Didn’t work when I tried it with a FedEx number. FedEx found it fine. Just got a blank page. Using latest Safari on a PowerBook.
27 November 2008 | Mark Said:
I use this all the time and mostly like the new interface, but you should group scan activity from the same city under a heading of the city name in my opinion.
28 November 2008 | Kent Said:
Worked fine today! Maybe the web had too much turkey and was napping. ove the new look! Thanks!
01 December 2008 | iSnoop.net Is Now Boxoh.com » Reviews, Web » Russell Heimlich Said:
[...] the tool has been so successful that it got spun-off as Boxoh.com. The site got a clean visual refresh making it easier to see where your package is at and the RSS [...]