[puravida]

Well, many of you might have noticed the forum was having "issues" today from 5:00pm to 5:30pm...

This was -for once- not the result of hackers or spammers bringing down the server. This time, it was advertising. Man, I thought this dedicated server could handle the traffic, but apparently not.

We just had 2,500 new people visit the forum within a 30 minutes period and almost all of them got a timeout or page cannot be displayed error. Nice. What a waste.

Oh well, I guess I'll buy less traffic next time!

I bought from bux.to, so if you choose to advertise to 'all' as opposed to premium members, keep in mind that they send ALL of your purchase almost immediately. Wow.

Brandon

[netguy]

Ouch .. that's similar to the "digg effect" :D

The important thing to know would be how well the traffic converts. I'd like to try such system once or twice, but I'd also like to know how many of the visitors really stay for more than 1 second. That would be the issue with most traffic schemes. And I also need to put more resources from WHM so that they don't kill my server. Ouch again

[Blair]

Haha, I also had the same problem last night :D Only that my traffic was 'for real'... I didn't think my website would continue to have so much traffic during Christmas period, so we didn't allocate more memory, and it passed the 50gb bandwidth... great! My luck that the ones I work with were in town and fixed the problem quickly..

[puravida]

netguy, on Dec 30 2007, 05:40 PM, said:

Ouch .. that's similar to the "digg effect" :D

The important thing to know would be how well the traffic converts. I'd like to try such system once or twice, but I'd also like to know how many of the visitors really stay for more than 1 second.

Well, I never pay for advertising without testing and making sure that it pays for itself.

In the case of bux.to, I would NOT recommend them. I will be disputing my payment as soon as possible. The reason is that during my testing, I had several webmasters from other countries help me out and I watched my stats and incoming, etc and I found out how they scammed me.

I just wrote up a detailed report in my webmaster-related blog here:
http://www.seconspiracy.com/2007/12/30/buy...se-study-buxto/

Quote

And I also need to put more resources from WHM so that they don't kill my server. Ouch again

Where exactly would you allocate more resources from within WHM? I haven't seen anything on doing that. It might be helpful for future reference.

[puravida]

Blair, on Dec 30 2007, 06:37 PM, said:

Haha, I also had the same problem last night :D Only that my traffic was 'for real'...

Must be nice... I remember when one of my major sites would receive more than 100,000 unique visitors in a month. That site would generate over $10,000 per month in earnings. :)

Congrats to you on your success!

[netguy]

I have a reseller account to juggle with all my sites and the ones my clients have. I allocate some space and bandwidth from them, create account etc. When one of my sites is getting too popular, I just log in into my Web Hosting Manager and allocate some more space. On individual accounts we have cPanel only, but a reseller account offers more management tools :)

[puravida]

netguy, on Jan 1 2008, 05:41 AM, said:

I have a reseller account to juggle with all my sites and the ones my clients have. I allocate some space and bandwidth from them, create account etc. When one of my sites is getting too popular, I just log in into my Web Hosting Manager and allocate some more space. On individual accounts we have cPanel only, but a reseller account offers more management tools :)

Ohhh... so, it's not server resources you're allocating; it's more bandwidth, etc. I get it now.

I have consolidated down to six (6) servers right now, and Get-Paid-Hwy is on one of my more powerful ones. But, it is sharing resources with about 150 other customer websites too. However, those other websites are very low usage and I would've expected the server to be able to handle 1,000+ concurrent users.

I was very disappointed by this --especially since GPH is running on a 2.4 GHz 1066FSB - Conroe \ Xeon 3060 (Dual Core) with 2Gb DDR2 667 ECC Ram. For those that aren't into computers, all of that techno babble means this site should be very fast. So, I'm really disappointed that it crashed.

[nightfall]

Brandon,

It would really depend on how the gateway is set up as well, is there a load balancer at work?

puravida, on Jan 2 2008, 01:25 AM, said:

Ohhh... so, it's not server resources you're allocating; it's more bandwidth, etc. I get it now.

I have consolidated down to six (6) servers right now, and Get-Paid-Hwy is on one of my more powerful ones. But, it is sharing resources with about 150 other customer websites too. However, those other websites are very low usage and I would've expected the server to be able to handle 1,000+ concurrent users.

I was very disappointed by this --especially since GPH is running on a 2.4 GHz 1066FSB - Conroe \ Xeon 3060 (Dual Core) with 2Gb DDR2 667 ECC Ram. For those that aren't into computers, all of that techno babble means this site should be very fast. So, I'm really disappointed that it crashed.

[puravida]

nightfall, on Jan 10 2008, 09:12 PM, said:

It would really depend on how the gateway is set up as well, is there a load balancer at work?

For now, GPH is just on a standard plan at theplanet and it does not span servers, so there is no load balancer in the mix. If GPH were an ultra-high traffic site (maybe one day!), then I would load balance between servers. At the moment, it isn't required except during "bursts" of traffic. Typically that doesn't happen too often but if it becomes more of a problem in the future, I may have to upgrade.

Before going that route, I can also just move GPH onto its own server by itself. That would make quite a difference too, I think.