Growing W3Counter

Like every year since spinning off W3Counter from Website Goodies in 2004, it’s exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it’s outgrown [...]

Design at a snail’s pace

It takes me so long to do so little with Photoshop. Still feels like it’s missing something too. Next thing I need to do, at least, is some CSS text replacement with images for those cruddy people still running IE6 with no anti-aliasing and without my favorite ‘Trebuchet MS’ font.
I won’t have much time [...]

54 million visits per day on a VPS?

More stress testing the VPS with scripts since nobody’s volunteered a real site. Just running a couple scripts continually downloading the tracker image from the VPS, it seems to be handling 2000-3000 queries per second on the database while extremely responsive.
Either something’s wrong or I underestimated just how little resources you need when you have [...]

I should hire a designer, but I’m lazy

…so I’m doing it myself again. I thought about holding a design contest, but that didn’t work last time I tried it. I don’t know if someone will get the details right from rough mockups, and details bug me.
W3Counter tells me less than 4% of visitors to the site have screens less than 1024 pixels [...]

Does anyone have a 500,000 daily pageview site?

The VPS is handling artificial load well. Now I need a real test, but I don’t have any sites getting nearly enough page views to see if the VPS will slow down with more realistic data. Anyone want to volunteer their high traffic site for a day?

GoDaddy: I’ll be easier on you from now on

I always recommend people stay away from GoDaddy when they’re looking for shared hosting. It’s not their primary business and they have way too many customers. The result is packed, locked down servers missing key features, and poor support from inexperienced technicians.
But at least they didn’t bungle up the VPS product like 1&1 did.

They want to buy — I better start selling

I’ve had a number of people come to me looking for a W3Counter plan that can handle more than the “Pro” plan. More websites, more pageviews, or sometimes both. If people are knocking on the door asking to buy, I need to figure out a way to sell what they want. I decided against [...]

W3Counter pWidget Rev 2

I just wrapped up testing the second revision W3Counter pWidget, the overlay that brings web stats right to your webpage, including W3Counter’s color-coded click overlay. It puts no extra burden on the webpage except a simple key listener until it’s activated by the user, loads data modularly on demand, and is completely cross-browser compatible [...]

Spooky visitor labeling

Hi Sara, Brian and Zach.

This “visitor labeling” feature I’ve been working on is kinda spooky, isn’t it?

Widgets and Custom Visitor Labels