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| Success Can Be Challenging |
Meeting a Demand Surge |
| A Success Story in Size-to-Fit |
| Eswaddle.com, often mentioned in past newsletters, had its products featured on the Dr. Phil tv program last week. It was rather astonishing to track the traffic spike directly after each airing of the show across the continental US time zones. As might be expected, their Cirrus server needed to grow. Because each step up in size doubles both the disk space and the cpu power, by the end of the day the site was working with 32 times the disk and 32 times the cpu it had started with. Size, however, is not everything. Tuning the Apache server to react appropriately was also an essential ingredient in keeping the site healthy and responsive through the traffic blitz. Once the traffic steadied at lower post-show levels, the site was able to resize again, this time to a smaller server. Apache server tuning appropriate to the newly selected size again finished the adjustment.
The good news is that you can order such resizes. They are readily handled at whatever time you need them. Just log into your customer portal, order an upgrade appropriate to your needs, and the resizing will happen. A brief period of downtime during the process occurs because services need to be restarted. If your needs are in the realm of unusual traffic such as E*swaddle experienced, you may also want to tune the Apache server appropriately. HTN staff can also do that tuning should you ask us to. Email to open a ticket for it (support@hens-teeth.net) or call us (866-HENS-NET). Because the Cirrus hosting accounts can grow and shrink on demand, the site owners pay for the extra capacity of the larger servers only when that capacity is needed. Resizing adjusts the amount billed automatically. You need not pay an entire month at a larger server rate if you only need days or weeks at that level. If you are not already using a Cirrus hosting account, you may well want to consider what your hosting would do in a similar success story situation. We are offering 50% off your first month’s hosting fee for any new HTN Cloud Hosting account (Cirrus, Stratus, or Ecommerce) billed monthly. Use promotional code MAYMONTH50 and act soon. The offer expires June 1, 2010. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP. |
Web Site Statistics
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| There is little more fascinating than tracking how folks use your site. Decisions on site design, product inventory, and so much more may rely on such details. Many site owners use the Google Webmaster Tools to collect and analyze website statistics.
Your hosting provider may also have some statistics available to you. If you have migrated to an HTN Cloud Account, you can get to traffic usage, resource usage, website statistics from one of two packages (AWStats or Webalizer), and management of your log retention. Because there is a choice of website statistics packages on the HTN Cloud accounts, you need to activate website statistics by selecting the package you want to use and specifying where the statistics will be available to you. You do this through your Plesk control panel. If you have more than one domain on your server, select the domain you want to work on. Click on Web Hosting Settings. Scroll down to the Services section. Under Web Services is a spot to select either Webalizer or AWStats. There is also a checkbox (which is checked by default) specifying the password-protected directory where the statistics will be kept. Press OK to submit the page so that the changes are saved. When you want to look at the statistics, again log into your Plesk control panel, select the domain you want, and click on Statistics, then Web Statistics. The system will ask for a login. It is expecting your ftp username and password. However you opt to use the statistics that are collected, analyzed, and presented to you, you can rest assured that you have resources available on which to base your business decisions.
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