Web Blog of Greg Mathews

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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