Previously blocsonic.com was built with Ruby on Rails. I got sick of dealing with the many, many crashes and sluggishness. I decided to port it to PHP. After about a year and trying out an extensive number of PHP frameworks, Yii clicked and seemed the perfect fit for me.
If you have time, maybe you can share with us your experience in using Yii. I definitely want to hear feedback so that we can make Yii better and better.
If you are using a dedicated server, you may also consider using server caching techniques. For example, you may consider squid, which will make your pages significantly faster.
Yeah, it's been a hectic couple months and will take a breather for a few days, but once I catch my wind and have a bit of time, I'll be sure to post a few thoughts.
As blocSonic is a profitless side-project at the moment, I'm currently hosted on a shared server. I'll definitely keep server caching in mind when I do make the move to a dedicated server.