In late October 2003, traffic to my personal website, www.borrett.id.au, suddenly spiked from an average of 5,000 hits per day to a peak of 215,000 hits per day. That's a 4,300% increase in daily traffic. Over the following months, the site averaged around 50,000 hits per day.
I first noticed this significant increase in site traffic back in November 2003 when I got a massive bill from my hosting provider, WebCentral, for excess data traffic. Something must be wrong, I thought. In more than five years of hosting with WebCentral, I had never come close to exceeding the built-in data traffic allowance of my hosting plan. But no, my website had suddenly gone ballistic.
It seems the world had switched on to "Petals Around the Rose". Interesting, given that the challenge / brain teaser had been online since early 1996!
Indeed, when talking to WebCentral about it, their technical support guy said, "Oh, so you're the one behind that website. I played and solved Petals Around the Rose just the other day!"
A search revealed that Petals was being referenced in discussion forums all over the web. There are even teachers using it as a part of their learning curriculum. Go figure!
I developed and implemented strategies to eliminate excess data charges, quickly restoring the normal cost of running my site. Phew!
Ash Nallawalla suggested I also sign up for Google AdSense and use my site's popularity to get some revenue to help subsidise my costs. However, it turned out Google AdSense wasn't supporting personal websites back in November 2003, so they rejected my application. However, late in April 2004, Google contacted me, stating that they had revised their policy and inviting me to reapply. So I did and was accepted.
Unfortunately, the Google AdSense algorithms are not able to accurately classify my pages with ads. Thus, they are serving up very few relevant adverts. The result has been an extremely low click-through rate, resulting in very little revenue. It seems I just can't win. (I've since contacted Google AdSense, and they are looking into it. Problem sites like mine actually help them to improve their ad delivery system.)
Anyway, everything finally settled down into a regular pattern. But then on 24 May 2004, my site traffic suddenly spiked again. Now, instead of averaging 50,000 hits per day, I'm getting over 250,000 hits per day! That's a 400% increase.
I'm now reviewing additional excess data traffic bills from WebCentral. Yet another cost-reduction strategy must be devised and implemented.
The World Wide Web certainly is a weird and wonderful place. Anyone who says they truly understand it is lying. No one, but no one, would have predicted what has been happening to my website lately.
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