The tax tool that used to live in Iceland
A Kansas property-tax research site, served for years from Reykjavik — because that’s just where the server was.
propertytaxes.me helps Kansas researchers look up county property-tax records — a real tool with a real database, refreshed nightly. For years, every one of those page loads swam the Atlantic twice: the server happened to be in Iceland, an ocean and most of a continent from the county courthouses it reports on.
This summer we brought it home to our Kansas City rack. The whole move, including a two-version database upgrade done mid-flight, cost visitors about fifteen minutes of downtime on a Friday night behind a tidy “back shortly” page. Not one record was lost, and the nightly data updates never missed an evening.
Pages that used to take the scenic route now load in about a tenth of a second.
The full write-up is coming. In the meantime the site itself is the demo — propertytaxes.me.