Biggest Day of Traffic
Darren Rowse posted a question on his site asking about a blogger’s biggest day of traffic.
For me it happened last year on the 2nd of October during the UAAP Sr Men’s Basketball Finals when I live blogged the event. The UAAP had been dubbed by the media as the premier collegiate league in the country, owing to the media coverage and the deluge of sponsors that the league attracts during the season.
They say that league viewership is the highest during 2 events: an Ateneo-La Salle game, whose school rivalry has been going on for decades and the second, you guessed it, during the finals. Add the fact the Philippines is one basketball crazy nation and you have there the perfect recipe for an avalanche of traffic.
Prior to October 2 I live blogged game 2 of the Finals because I wanted to experience live blogging a fast paced event. It doesn’t get any faster than a championship basketball game. When school pride is at stake, emotions and adrenalin are always running high.
I wasn’t planning to live blog the final game because it takes the fun out of watching the game. Then I got a comment in one of my posts asking if I could live blog the event. He was an alumni of one of the schools and he was stuck working in Singapore with no access to a TV. Wanting to oblige him I decided to live blog the game because I could relate to what he was experiencing. While training in Japan, my school was playing in the Finals and I was just hungry for live game information. Not to mention that I got stuck in the US once for 3 months and missed practically half of the season, enough to drive any hoop addict crazy.
That accepted offer set off a chain of events that got me my highest traffic for a day. Turns out their were a bunch of them in their office who came from the same school. One of them emailed an alumni email group. Then somebody posted a link to my site on a popular forum in the Philippines then another in a car forum. An hour into live blogging my site was timing out already with the wave of page reloads. My site was ill equipped to handle the traffic because I didn’t have caching enabled. As a work around to the problem, I chopped up the game data to smaller pieces so that webserver access to the DB would be faster. This helped the site from timing out. Afterwards I compiled again the data to show the full results of the game.
The end result was that I got about 1,200 hits and 7000 page views for that day alone. It also skewed the “average hits” of my site’s data in sitemeter badly enough that I didn’t bother referring to it for a couple of months.
[source]
Tags:
Wow, that’s phenomenal. I haven’t had any traffic beyond 250 in a day, ever. Galing ah.
Thanks Niko’
:D