off-the-charts ATS Growth!, page 1
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Topic started on 9-11-2003 @ 01:31 PM by SkepticOverlord
Today I decided to look at some of the stats we have that go back to June of 2002... what an eye opening. First, many members who have been coming to ATS for more than six months will remember the chaotic times of early this year. As we began to see some increased popularity and awareness, our bandwidth began to exceed the contracted amount with Simon's first hosting provided. Also, there were several times where our forum was disabled simply because we were overwhelming the shared server on which ATS shared hosting space. This first graph is the most startling of all, total monthly page-views, looking back 16 months. You'll see that we're now serving about 21 times more pages per month, than this same time last year. Amazing. Our growth in monthly unique visitors has also been something to watch... and this graph may not be telling the whole story. The old shared space server with Liquid Web ran reports both on the main site (www.abovetopsecret.com) and the forum (xmb.abovetopsecret.com), so we may have received several visits that were recorded in both sets of reports. In any event, I totaled both reports from the old site. And in raw visitors, we're receiving about 4.5 times the number of visitors as this time last year. Bandwidth growth has also been amazing, especially since the new forum on this and the previous Pentium server were designed to use far less images than the version running on Liquid Web. Even still, our bandwidth is about seven times what we were serving last year. And the above chart for October does not include the BTS traffic which is now being counted separate from ATS. We can't do this without our members. Thanks to everyone for helping this growth be as amazing as it is.


reply posted on 9-11-2003 @ 01:59 PM by SkepticOverlord
Originally posted by smirkley Anyway, interesting that the growth really began at the implementation of the Pentium server. I wonder if that is becouse of the visitor retention due to less connectivity issues, or a parallel marketing effort? Notice the same effect with the changing to the xenon server, Is this a result of the bandwidth serving faster pages, allowing for more page views in the same time frame, or even extending visitor time retention?
Well, with the first shared-space server, our stats were limited by how much the server could serve. There were very often times where the server took more than 10 seconds to process and deliver the forum home page.... we were killing it. With the addition of the Pentium server, we suddenly were able to meet the demand. But within 5 months, we began to experience the same problem... I had to restart the web server and do other routine performance maintenance on a daily basis just to keep that over-worked Petium running (ask Bob88, he's been on the receiving end of several frustrated AIM sessions!). What tends to happen when you reach or suprass the capacity of a webserver is that no one can get anything at all. The number of requests per second exceed the machine's capability to respond, but the requests keep piling up! And then nothing gets out as the machine is completely overwhelmed. We hit this ceiling several times on the Pentium server. Now with the high-horsepower Dual-Xenon server, we again have the capacity to meet demand... where we go from here is anyone's guess.
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