Forum gone massive

[Brian Turner]

Got a forum covering a certain niche that has been getting an amazing amount of traffic this week.

The site was already successful and busy, doing around 8k uniques per day, but yesterday alone it had 35k uniques.

At 7:30 last night it had over 250 members and 1800 guests!

I know WebHostingTalk used to be busy, but at present my forum is even busier than that!

Server crashed last night from the load - didn't help that I'm also running another million plus forum on it, but all seems to be working fine now.

It's a nice beefy quad core xeon with 4GB of RAM - thought I'd better get more specs than I need to allow for growth. Normally that means burning money, but this time around, actually making sense.

Also means Adsense earnings are great this month.

[Solicitors Mortgages]

Originally Posted by Brian Turner

Got a forum covering a certain niche that has been getting an amazing amount of traffic this week.

The site was already successful and busy, doing around 8k uniques per day, but yesterday alone it had 35k uniques.

At 7:30 last night it had over 250 members and 1800 guests!

Nice jump. Did your analytics tell you where the traffic was coming from?

Originally Posted by Brian Turner

Also means Adsense earnings are great this month.

...waiting for at least a screen grab of your adsense placement

James.

[MichaelWall]

Brian as Solicitors Mortgages says do you know why the sudden upsurge in traffic?

[Brian Turner]

Yep - it's a forum in a certain technology niche, and users were hit by massive technical issues at the beginning of this week. Most came from Google searches, but I also recently got a news section syndicated on Google, so sent out a general notice, which brought in an additional 5k visitors/day on top of the 30k visiting the forums.

Adsense looks lovely, and it breaks my heart that it'll have to go down as the traffic decreases. Still, the big influx of new members will hopefully provide a positive boost to the forum activity as well and help grow the site further, which was always my intention anyway.

Was just amazing to suddenly find one of my sites getting more traffic than a behemoth like WebHostingTalk - if only for a few days.

[Joff]

This is the stuff dreams are made of

I had a similar spike whilst away on holiday, although it wasn't anything close to your number of visitors.

[Brian Turner]

Unfortunately, it looks like any Adsense earnings over the period are going to be wiped out by legal settlement over a copyright dispute with another site. C'est la vie.

[Brian Turner]

What's been really interesting about this is seeing just how much admin work is required with a seriously busy forum. A constant stream of help emails, reported post emails, and having to watch for incidents or even illegal posts made to the forums.

[Natkits]

Do you not have Mods in place to deal with that sort of thing, Brian?

Or is it that the traffic increase has overwhelmed them?

[Brian Turner]

There are plenty of mods there - about 20+ on the list, but even then, they've felt overwhelmed at times.

It's been a complete learning experience - I've had to dedicated a massive amount of time ensuring everything runs smoothly, and additionally to keep everything in line - encourage and educate staff, and additionally was forced to put in play a number of rules to be enforced that works with the community interest.

The lucky thing is that it was running on a dedicated server already - this was namely because the forum was already an income generator, so the income needed protecting with reliable hosting. Without that dedicated server, I would have lost significant revenues if the site had gone down for an extended period.

[ChrisS]

Unfortunately, it looks like any Adsense earnings over the period are going to be wiped out by legal settlement over a copyright dispute with another site. C'est la vie.

Wow thats horrible, was it copied content?