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Hello All,

I'm Big Bear from joomlabear.com. We create free joomla templates and also build custom Joomla sites to feed our families.

We recently completed a rebuild of ninjakiwi.com using Joomla 1.0.15.

Pretty happy with it so far - performs well with over 100,000 visits per day

We built a custom module to change the template color scheme and a custom component and mambot to include games inside content items. Also used 404sef URL rewriting component, JoomSEO, JoomlaPack and a commercial cacheing component to help speed page load times.

Let us know what you think.

Cheers

Big Bear

100k visits is pretty impressive, so how many page views per visit Bigbear? I'm interested to know your server setup to handle that

Hey Lever,

Yeah the 100k is impressive

Bear in mind (no pun intended) the site does not belong to me personally - ninjakiwi has been around for a while and have built a very good following - the traffic was there before we did the rebuild.

It was a slightly contentious issue when they approached us at Joomlabear whether Joomla would be able to handle that level of traffic - Of course I personally knew it would be fine... (fingers crossed!) Just look at Joomla.org's Alexa rank Joomla must get a ton of traffic and it runs on... Joomla!

I probably should check with the client before I divulge too much about the server config but I can say it is a single server - multi core and as it turns out has loads of excess resources at this point - in other words I feel confident it could probably handle 4-5 times this traffic before we have issues.

Go Joomla!

PS: remember the cache component - helped immensely - turns the database output into html files that are stored for a specified period of time meaning the server has to do substantially less work with requests...

WOW, 100K visitors/day is really an accomplishment both on the marketing and technical side. Our joomla based game site is just going past 5K daily visits and we are thrashing and crashing. First we switched to a dedicated server, we're now in discussions whether we should switch to two servers: one for the database, one for the webpages.

Congrats. Are you specialized in this area?

I'm not specialised in server optimisation but have been a web developer/designer for some 10+ years, you can pick up a few tricks in that time ;-)

In most cases you should not need 1 dedicated server, let alone 2, to run a 5000 visits per day site. Even a VPS should easily handle this easily. Search forums.joomla.org for "high traffic joomla site" or similar phrases and you'll find a few posts on this with some tips.

pm me if you want to discuss off the forum - I can't discuss the full details of the hosting here because of my clients privacy.

I'd be interested to know what host you have your dedicated with? Most are really not up to par at all. Do you want to post a url to your site? Maybe there is something like an ajax shoutbox that is killing your server with requests... But I would hope a decent host would help you troubleshoot some of those issues before selling you more hardware.

Our host (fastservers) is actually being surprisingly helpful as we dig into the problem. I can't complain about them at all other than one guy's initial reaction to throw hardware at it

The site is http://www.SpellingCity.com
You'll see that it's a multimedia rich site in a funny way. Each word that is selected is a separate set of MP3 reads.

We've found a number of pretty sloppy problems on the site. There's probably more problems to be found (the site had several coders who worked on it in succession). For instance, we had a search function "find a list" which would pretty much search endlessly, which we've now fixed. And there are some other searches which don't seem to have any indexes attached so they are chewing up enormous amounts of CPU and reads.

Nice looking site - I probably can't help to much as it sounds like you've got a good handle on it already.
I would suggest that you are correct to chase up those scripting bugs as the cause of your issues first and foremost - It will cost you a less in the long run to get the site functioning correctly and not have to throw cash at he hardware.

Here's what we've found and fixed on the spelling website .
1. Search - WE had a way of searching for spelling lists which had no end to the process. It searched by list name, teacher name, and list content. And with hundreds of new lists being created daily, this was a PIG.
2. Flash game errors - They would search for data with incorrect addresses and we never fixed it. Until now.
3. Newsletter - WE found that the acajoom newsletter component was doing something every 15 seconds and this was consuming about a third of our CPU bandwidth. Weird. The acajoom people are actively working with us to solve this now.

Other suspects
- We had search-friendly page titles on. For debugging purposes, we've turned them off. Also, we wonder if it's consuming resources somehow.
- Saving lists. We actually save every list ever entered whether or not the user asked to save it. There are potential reaons for this but for the moment, it's off.

We're getting bucket loads of users so we are really anxious to see if we can fix our programming errors.

And how is performance with that configuration?

Just a thought, but you might want to start a thread in another forum on this because it's probably just you and me here and some people looking for pretty sites ;-)

I use sh404SEF for URL rewriting, very good, no extra server load as it caches URL's. Be careful modifying or turning off URL rewriting as it is a major - If you are getting lots of traffic then people are linking to your site - switch off URLrewriting and your incomig links could be broken... Also to google it will appear that the page was deleted which is also very bad... I would say URL rewriting is probably not the culprit and you should leave it as it was because the impact of turning it off now could be very bad.

Fixing the newsletter issue sounds like it will help a lot.

Finally do you want to share your server specs? you can email me info [@] joomlabear.com if you like. I know you said you were on a dedicated but there are servers and then there are servers if you know what I mean ;-)

Mr. Joomla Bear, you mention that a "commercial cache" package was invaluable in speeding the Ninja Kiwi site up. Any chance you could share with us what package and where to purchase it?

Hi Rabies,
Yes we used this:
http://www.joomlatwork.com/products/com ... mance.html
Very pleased with this caching engine.
I would like to note however that the server hosting this site copes fine without caching - we tested this recently and found the server did not have issues with 100,000+ per day and no caching.
Cache does however speed the page load time considerably and of course this is important to keep users on the site and interested - make it snappy!
Cheers
Big Bear

I'm still amazed at the number: 100,000 visits per day.
I was looking at the site trying to figure out the revenue-generators. I saw one google advertisement, are the rest directly sold advertisements? Could you give a sense of how much they make?

You'll notice that SpellingCity is now above 10K visitors on school days and it's technically stable. But still, no revenue yet. I'm looking to build my understanding of revenue models.

john

You should be able to make 20-30 cents per month or more for each daily visitor, assuming a variety of ad formats (not just Adsense).

So, 1000 daily visitors = $200 to $300 per month.

If you negotiate direct sponsorship, you should make even more than this.

WOW. I like the idea of a quarter per visitor?

But are we talking apples and oranges?
My site stats, from awstats (or webalizer) for August:
- over 100,000 visits
- around 60,000 visitors

Questions.
1. What would your $.20-$.30 per visit be based on, visitors or visit? You talk about "for each daily visitor", a term that I am unfamiliar with.
2. Could you help me make $.25 per ...unique visitor would be fine. Let's make a deal but I'd be inclined to offer half of the money for the first 3 months if you think you can do such things...

It's the vocabulary.co.il site that we should work on.....

Hey Guys,

I can't give you any info on the 100,000 per day site as it's not my business. However I can say that it all depends hugely on what market your site is in.

20-30c per visitor is way to high for a market like games. Games = traffic, games does not = high value per visitor or click.

A quick example of adsense revenue from my own experience; A food site I maintain is only generating about 5-12 cents per click - adsense on a finance related site is generating $1-2 per click.

But then you have to keep in mind CTR, or click-through-rate.

Adsense CTR can be quite good because ads are targeted to the content - you may see 10-20% on some sites. However it depends greatly on your market. When I ran adsense on http://Joomlabear.com my CTR was usually lower than 1% - sometimes as low as 0.1% - It wasn't worth it. Very tech savvy people tend not to click on ads. CTR on generic banners, from adsense and other banner ad providers is also usually quite low - banners are not clicked a lot. Sometimes banner providers will pay you in cost per impressions - With generic sites this may only be 30c per 1000 impressions. Sometimes it can be a lot better depending on your content.

This is a good article on how profitable techcrunch is http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... JSNSTC.DTL they mention when they started out they were getting $4-5 per 1000 ad impressions - now they get more like $20-30 per 1000.

I would suggest you sneak a small adsense block into spelling city for a few days and see how it does. There is nothing like learning from experience.

Agreed. Just do it!

*The info I posted is based on my experience with a games site. I did not say .20c per visit. I did not say .20c per visitor every day. I said average out to .20c per daily visitor PER MONTH.

I make between $500 to $700 a month based on average of 3000-4000 visitors a day. So do the math. (oh and you need mostly north american or UK visitors. Visits from easter europe and asia, don't pay much).

hey Rabies,

I totally agree with you - wasn't disputing your figures, but from your original post wasn't quite sure how you were adding it all up.

I was really just clarifying for johne that he shouldn't expect 20-30c per visitor (as awesome as that would be

Rabies are you adsense only on your game site? Or using other providers? I experimented with DMX and some other networks but adsense wins out in most situations.

Valueclick, Casale Media, and Adsense is my bottom bottom tier in that.

Are you saying ValueClick and Casale Media are generating higher revenue for you?

Very interesting.

It will be the homepage without a doubt - this is true of most sites.

I cannot disclose full stats as I am not the owner of this site - It belongs to my clients.

I can say it's doing substantially more than 100,000 per day at present and the server still holds up fine.

We've just finished a major revamp to the original http://ninjakiwi.com/ built with Joomla. The site now handles closer to 150,000 visitors per day with ease.
Do let me know what you think of the updated design.
I'm very pleased with my image optimization on this edition, including use of CSS to minimise the number of image loads per page view.

can't believe it!
I think most may so many sites use the sites's flash game program,and link to the site.

Hi guys,
Thanks for teh interesting topic.
I am trying to enter this space with a new games site base on Joomla! and I would like to ask you which are the things I need to take into account in order to make it SEO friendly? I am not a technical guy and I have not launched the site yet, as I would like to start it in teh best possible way to be found by search engines...
Any advice is welcome.
Thanks

wow 100k visits is amazing how could u do that

Actually many websites do even more traffic than this - it's about creating content that users want - I bet joomla.org does more than 100k per day.

perezhilton's blog reportedly does over 10 million per month - that's 300,000+ per day ^^

perezhilton's blog appeals to a young demographic of American teens who like Hollywood gossip.

It's true about Perezed Hilton's blog - but I don't quite see your point?
Are you saying you can get a lot of traffic by targeting that audience?

Hi BigBear. I suppose I am. Gossip and rumour about famous celebrities or actors sells magazines. Younger people are more computer literate and seek out the things that interest them: fashion, music and celebrity gossip. I'm not saying this is the traffic to aim for but it is a large group and they spend a lot of time on the net, chatting through chat programs to their mates and playing games on Bebo and Facebook. Where the real money is? I would say Tech news. I've done basic blogs with affiliate links and the traffic I got from StumbleUpon was surprising, set against the traffic I'd seen for my products site (below). On the products site saw a few stumbles but the Tech blogs saw over a hundred visits in burst of 3 or 4 waves. Twitter can bring a bit of traffic but most of the accounts are automated and just spam accounts.

Interesting thoughts - thanks for sharing :-)

I have had similar experiences with ad revenue - the general gossip theme does drive substantial traffic - but techy stuff draws higher paying advertisers, just speaking generally.

e.g. Adsense clicks will be more profitable.

Twitter - I still can't get my head around this.

I think that the reason for that it that kids generally have less disposable income plus tech blogs are about tech things which usually means the latest gadgets. The more expensive and mainstream the item the higher the click through. The less impressions per click the better.

I was looking at your site http://healthyeatingrecipes.org and I see you have the pdf and print still set up on the page. I suppose being a recipe site you may well need them but if you run the site through http://www.dead-links.com it will class them as dead links. I found this out only a day or two ago and a Google search confirmed this. Also read that the pdf can rank higher.

I think Twitterr can work for sites like TechCruch or Mashable but is pointless for product sites. It's awash with marketers and personal trainers all trying to be the next big thing.