WHM site speed-up

After having been told twice that there was not really anything to be done to speed up the WHM site, I called Go-Daddy again today to try to get improved performance before trying another provider. Now that I could direct the tech to the mirror site for comparison, he looked into a real solution and has moved the main site to a different, newer, less-crowded server, noticeably improving performance.

I may still change providers, since I’ve found one that allows shared hosting among multiple domains (which is convenient, since I have several domains to host). Note that nothing would change on the visitor side (that is, it would be the same domain name), it would just be served from a different server owned by a different provider.

Visitorship is back down to around 20,000 per day—which is still 50% higher than pre-election figures. With better performance, visitorship should go up a bit.

Also, thanks to these folks for helping to support the site financially….

• Glendon
• Sandra
• Jacob
• Frances
• Richard
• Geraldine
• Gary

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge those kind souls who have contributed recently to the upkeep of the WHM.

• Dennis
• David
• Logan
• Casey
• Glendon
• Faerie’s Finest
• Rodney
• Daniel
• Rick
• EL
• Paul
• Janet

I wish I had bitten the bullet and upgraded the site to its own server for January. There was only a real crush of visitors for three days or so, but I’m afraid many new visitors were disappointed that the site didn’t load quickly. WHM never actually went down, tho (thank you, GoDaddy), and the mirror was always available and will continue to be until I’m sure it’s no longer necessary.

For reference, the site typically gets about 13,000 page views a day. That ramped up to 30,000 in the week before the inauguration. The 20th and 21st saw about 120,000 page views each, with the 22nd seeing 83,000. It’s now ramped down to 46,000, altho the mirror shot up to around to 25,000 since I added a link to the front page of the main site.

Hopefully along the way we’ve picked up a few more regular White House enthusiasts. I noticed that Pete’s Facebook group White House Fanatics has nearly reached 100 members now. Hurray!

Statistics revisited

As you may have noticed from the slow site performance, page views are back up substantially and probably will stay that way thru the inauguration. Oct. 5 represents the last “normal” week. I’ve kept the mirror site updated.

5-Oct-08	56,761
12-Oct-08	70,975
19-Oct-08	73,760
26-Oct-08	78,386
2-Nov-08	192,762
9-Nov-08	369,645
16-Nov-08	525,377
23-Nov-08	150,528
30-Nov-08	115,720
7-Dec-08	96,561
14-Dec-08	137,404
21-Dec-08	82,121
28-Dec-08	104,769
4-Jan-09	142,713

Top search queries:

white house museum

white house floor plan

resolute desk

white house bowling alley

white house residence

oval office

white house swimming pool

whitehousemuseum

white house

president’s bedroom

lincoln bedroom

Busy, busy, busy

C-SPAN’s White House Week seems to have gained a fair amount of attention. WHM site performance is quite slow (back up to 20,000 page views a day again).

I’ll make a point of bringing the mirror up to date.

A return to normalcy

Visitorship seems to have more or less returned to normal. I’ll maintain the mirror site for a while longer. I have a feeling that visitorship will spike again around January 20.

Site stats

Visitorship continues to rise, apparently with a mention on MSN this week. Here are the page views from the past few weeks, the first of which represents the last “normal” week.

5-Oct-08	56,761
12-Oct-08	70,975
19-Oct-08	73,760
26-Oct-08	78,386
2-Nov-08	192,762
9-Nov-08	369,645
16-Nov-08	525,377

Site performance still poor

I called GoDaddy again about the slow performance of the site, but they’ve confirmed that even with the upgrade it’s just swamped with user requests. Mirroring content wouldn’t even help, since it’s not a traffic thru-put problem.

The only real solution at this point would be to upgrade to my own server, which is $150 a month. And with donations still topping out at $0 a month, that’s not economically feasible. 😦

I’ll spend some time breaking up content so the individual pages have fewer images and see if that improves things.

Page views

Traffic went thru the roof as election day approached. I’m now getting some offers to add advertising, but the potential sponsors are kind of random (patriotic or DC-related products might make sense). This chart shows page views (not unique visitors) from the beginning of the site to this week, with this week’s final numbers partly a projection.

UPDATE: I’ve updated the chart to show the real numbers up to Saturday, and they’re even higher than I projected.

Welcome, newcomers!

I just looked at the Web stats for the WHM for the first time in several weeks and found that traffic is up considerably. The site first broke 30,000 page views a week in February of 2007 and held steady thru-out summer and fall until December, when visitorship went up markedly. Since then, we’ve been enjoying about 60,000 page views a week.

Welcome to everyone who found us in the last couple of months!

Blair more popular than Queen

As you might imagine, visitorship was up substantially for the weeks of the Queen’s and PM’s visits, about a 30% and 70% increase in page views respectively. But on the 17th, page views skyrocketed 600% from a usual of 4,000 to 25,000 in one day. “Yo, Blair” indeed.

Now if we could only get the Beatles to visit, followed by Jesus, we could solve that question once and for all too.

I don’t understand MySpacers

Visits to WhiteHouseMuseum.org have been increasing pretty steadily since it went live in June 2006. In mid-July, it was pulling in about 3,000 page views a week. Now it’s pulling in over 30,000. That’s still not a lot, but it’s a good growth pattern. Typical daily page views of around 4,000 suggest there are several hundred individual visitors each day.

Adding links to WHM from Wikipedia articles that relate to the White House has been the most help, but a fair number of hits come from MySpace pages, most of which seem to be leeching photos (linking directly to them to be served from my host when someone looks at their page). I don’t really understand why Dorishemar would want a picture of George Bush’s sitting room as her background, much less why Rory the Bass would want the Presidential Park diagram as his. And I’m completely baffled as to why Budd Dwyer Suicide Fan Club would want a picture of Harry Truman’s bowling alley prominently displayed along with Ronald McHitler.

Top 11 Queries that bring visitors to WHM:

• white house museum (multiple variations)
• white house bowling alley
• butler’s pantry
• white house floor plan
• resolute desk
• white house swimming pool
• roosevelt room
• white house residence
• tennis
• truman balcony
• oval office