Web Blog of Greg Mathews

This is a sad day as I have had to block OperaMini from accessing my site.

Opera Mini is a service that lets normal cell phones use the Internet. See http://www.operamini.com/help/faq/#mini . In short, the Opera Mini servers fetch Internet content — including feeds — and displays it suitably for cell phones, all on behalf of the Opera Mini users.

I discovered a couple of weeks ago a large number of hits from the Opera Mini IP range and emailed them with reguards to the amount of hits to my site they where making, I am talking nearly 1000 hits an hour.

Opera’s response was :

The Opera Mini servers maintain xml feeds for its users and refresh these several times per day, depending on feed popularity. It is not normal that the downloads scale up to the thousands, however. We are currently investigating this issue to see if there is a problem with the service that makes it misbehave like you describe.

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When discussing web sites, we all talk about getting the content right, this in turn leads to better chance of getting traffic and obviously planning the content is important.

One thing that doesn’t appear to be mentioned that often and can be extremely important if the content does its job and attracts a lot of content and that is planning how you are going to host your site, and being prepared for whats ahead.

If your site is busy, this could be because it gets a lot of traffic and/or is dynamic so uses more resources than a basic static site then you need to monitor the server hosting your site to ensure that you are not going to run out of ‘allowed’ resources.

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This is a strange one. Over the past month the traffic to my site has been growing nicely thank you, reaching 140,000 visitors last tuesday. This was causing my server to overload so I thought I would get a 2nd server and use round robin DNS to rotate the traffic between the two servers.

So I did just that on Tuesday, over the next day or so I spent some time playing with the new server, stopping cron jobs running that used a lot of resources and I didn’t really need, mainly ‘Direct Admin’ tasks but by Thursday I had everything set up.

Great, more servers, more resources to cope with more traffic. But No, since I set up the round robin DNS my taffic has dropped drastically. On Tuesday 5th June I was seeing an average of 5800 visits an hour, by Saturday 9th June this has dropped to an average of 3700 visits an hour, thats a 37% drop in a matter of 4 days.

Traffic from the US dropped by 41% over those few days, India dropped 60% and the UK dropped 34% in just a few days.
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