Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day from Net Relief Solutions.

That's right, it's the Canadian holiday and we won't be working today. Rest assured we'll be right back to work tomorrow! For our fellow Canadians, enjoy a nice day off. For our American neighbors, just a few more days and you can enjoy your holiday!

Once again,
Happy Canada Day.

News Server Meltdown 2009

Reading some news reports revealed some interesting statistics today. The news of Michael Jackson's recent death triggered a wide spread traffic spike on news servers. Larger corporates such as ABC, CBC, and the L.A. times were more or less down for the count. At one point only 10% of visitors were able to view there news articles. The demand lasted for about 2 hours and did not settle back to high-normal levels until late evening.

Google's report on their official blog is also very interesting. While the server farm itself didn't have any trouble serving up pages another issue cropped up. Google recieved such a sudden eruption of requests that anyone searching was presented with the "We're Sorry" message. Fortunatly the incident only lasted for 25 minutes.

Here is the graph from Google's blog:



I admit I'm curious what the scale up the left side is supposed to be, but that is a really high peak in searches for Michael.

Are Your Running Analytics?

Are you running Goggle's Analytics on your website?

Chances are you should be! The free web tool is a wonderful resource for web masters.

There are many statistics applications out there that give wonderful reports, but the idea of having everything managed for you with all the bells and whistles you'll ever need is something to consider. Consider also the people collecting your usage data are the same people that will apply that data to their search rankings.

A warning: many developers feel that adding analytics to an undeveloped website could lead to poorer results in the search engine listings; however, consider that the same tools will be able to help you dicipher why people are leaving your website.

Google Analytics offers more than just telling how many people visit, and what they visit. You can view geographical data that tells you where people come from. You can compare all of your refereals, and other traffic sources along with the keywords that brought them. You can view an extensive history of data. You can even run conversion goals and campaigns to see if you current web site is doing its job.

For example you can use the bounce rate tools to determine which pages people are pressing the back button on, and then review the page to see why. In even more detail you can produce an overlay on your website that shows you trends of exactly where users are clicking (by number of clicks on a link).

All of these things and more will definitely be an asset (worth the risk) to help increase traffic and conversions.

Read more on Google's Analytics website.

Twitter Growth is Slowing

It's been a busy year for the people at Twitter. With celebrities like Oprah and Hugh Jackman promoting their use of the web service. In just the last few months Twitter usage has increased (on a per person basis) up to nearly 16 minutes average. The data from Nielsen indicates that the usage is possibly begining to taper off around the 16 minute mark. This is hardly bad news, but just a sign of stability for the Twitter admins. Maybe now they can take the time to catch up on building the server farm to run the software.



For this developer Twitter seems a waste of time, at least in the application most people seem to use it. From a business point of view it seems to take place of a sort of news brodcasting tool. Service annoucments or updates on policy and products could be announced via Twitter, but why not just have these things in custom applications on your own website?

All things considered they have done well for themselves and have every right to be proud.