How Sarah Wendell Keeps Her 21-Year-Old Book Blog and Reader Community Online

Sarah Wendell has run her independent book review blog since 2005, growing it from a niche romance fiction site into a global community with daily content, a long-running podcast, and a database of more than 9,000 books. See how a dedicated server from InMotion Hosting and ongoing work from the InMotion Solutions team keep her site fast, accessible, and supported by people.

 

The Story of Sarah Wendell

Sarah taught herself HTML in 1997 to get out of writing a final paper as an English major. The trade was simple: design the English department’s website instead of writing a paper. The site shipped, she graduated, and she never stopped publishing online.

In 2005, Sarah and her co-founder launched the blog to do something nobody else was doing at scale: review romance fiction with the same critical seriousness reviewers bring to literary fiction. Two decades later, the site publishes daily, runs a weekly podcast Sarah produces herself (currently on episode 716), supports a paid member community, and houses a book repository of more than 9,000 titles that the editorial team draws from for reviews, search, and historical features.

In a recent 30-day window, the site recorded roughly 88,000 users and 406,000 page views. The whole business runs through one website. There is no warehouse. There are no shipped products. Every reader interaction depends on the site loading, the comments threading correctly, and the database returning answers.

Sarah’s blog is hosted on an Advanced Dedicated Server, with ongoing application-layer support from the InMotion Solutions team.

The Challenge of Running a Heavy, Long-Lived Site Solo

A 21-year-old WordPress site with multiple large databases is not a normal hosting workload. The book repository alone holds thousands of records the front end pulls from in different directions. Comments, podcast transcripts, daily posts, and a daily RSS-driven newsletter all run through the same infrastructure.

Earlier in the site’s history, performance issues were a daily concern. Databases slowed under load, popular plugins conflicted with the size of the dataset (Sarah recounts one stats plugin failing because the site was simply too big), and pages would crash. Her audience noticed quickly. The community emails her the moment something breaks.

Sarah’s focus is content and community. She is one person running editorial, production, hosting decisions, and podcast editing, with a full-time assistant. Keeping up with shifting Google performance standards, accessibility requirements, and the moving target of WordPress optimization was not a job she could take on alone.

 

Why Sarah Wendell Chose InMotion Hosting

Sarah was introduced to InMotion Hosting by her development partner, an agency that specializes in author and publishing websites. The agency had used InMotion for other clients and negotiated Sarah’s first plan, a shared hosting environment, more than a decade ago. As traffic grew and the database matured, Sarah moved up the product ladder, eventually landing on her own dedicated server.

“I have my own server now. It’s like the website got its own apartment.” That apartment came with something Sarah could not get from her previous hobbyist host: a direct line to engineers who already understood her stack and could act on it.

 

How InMotion Hosting Responded

Once Sarah’s site was on dedicated infrastructure, the InMotion Solutions team, led on her account by Robert Jenkins under manager Parag Parikh, took on the application-layer work that one person running a content business cannot reasonably do alone:

1. Performance optimization: Robert wrote custom code to handle image format conversion to PNG across the site, reducing page weight and improving load times. The Solutions team also worked through Google Core Web Vitals improvements as the standards changed.
2. Accessibility implementation: The team recommended and deployed an all-in-one accessibility solution. Shortly after, a reader emailed Sarah specifically to thank her for the accessibility button, including the option to hide images while browsing.
3. Database and plugin troubleshooting: With multiple large databases in play, plugins that work fine on a 50-post blog can fail outright on a 21-year-old site. The Solutions team helps identify what works at Sarah’s scale.
4. Direct support access: When something breaks, Sarah opens a chat. In one case, she identified a problem after her plane landed, opened chat from her seat in row 30, and the support team had it fixed before she finished deplaning.

 

The Results

The site is faster, more stable, and easier for a one-person operation to run, even as traffic and database size have grown.

Sarah’s own assessment, captured in a five-star Trustpilot review, names the engineers who made the difference and points to the same outcome the call surfaced: a 20-year-old, high-publish-volume site that performs reliably because the people behind the infrastructure know it.

Sarah is direct about what keeps her with InMotion after six-plus years.

“When I reach out and I have an issue, there are people who are actually invested. That’s your greatest asset, because so few companies have a person. They have an AI.”

– Sarah Wendell

For a business where the website is the entire business, that distinction matters. The site is the storefront, the product, and the customer relationship. Keeping it responsive, accessible, and backed by people who can act when something breaks is what frees Sarah to focus on what she actually does: writing about romance fiction and running a 21-year-old reading community.

This Client Spotlight is a promotional feature based on an interview with the customer. The content has been prepared by InMotion Hosting’s marketing team in collaboration with the featured business. The featured business may have received compensation or other incentives in connection with this spotlight.

The views, opinions, experiences, and statements expressed in this spotlight are those of the customer and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of InMotion Hosting or its employees. InMotion Hosting does not endorse or guarantee the products, services, business practices, or claims of the featured customer. The fact that InMotion Hosting hosts the customer’s website does not constitute an endorsement.

All information is provided for general informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. Results may vary.