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.

I did think well maybe the past week saw an exceptional amount of traffic which may have inflated the statistics so I compared two days a week apart, Saturdays 2nd June and 9th June and of the top ten countries where the traffic orriginates, 8 had dropped over the week, some just a few % but the biggest drop over the week being India dropping 35% in traffic in 7 days.

Traffic has still increased over the past month as a whole but I have to wonder why the drop all of a sudden. It has to be to do with changes I have made this week, but what? why? or does it, is it just natural loss, ie people not using the site as often?

At the moment it does not appear to be as before when the site was dropped from the Google serps as it hasn’t.

Do I sit it out and see if things improve as they are? or do I revert back to the single server and see if that makes a difference? Can a round robin DNS cause a site not to resolve? oh so many questions I better look for some answers.