A few words on how the web site and its server are holding up.

I've had a couple people email and say their post got lost, and I've had some missing emails, etc., so the computer geek in me came out and I did some digging into the server logs that tell me about how much traffic is occurring on this site.

For the month of September so far:
-We had our 1 millionth hit today, though that number is not a very good measure of overall traffic (see note below). but it does sound impressive, doesn't it :-)
-Last Wednesday, 9/8, the site had its usual 750 visitors. Over the next week, the numbers are:
8/9: 750
9/9: 1100
9/10: 2100
9/11: 2500
9/12: 3900
9/13: 5400
9/14: 3600
9/15: 4200
9/16: 2700
9/17: 2500

This shows what I was expecting: immediately before and after Ivan's battering, more and more people turned to us for news. The peak was on 9/13, which is just as the cell phones in the area started working again. Since they have, more people are able to contact people directly and are needing this site less and less. I imagine the fact that we have pictures now might drive those numbers back up a bit for a few days.

While I always love to see our visitor stats as high as possible (and think that 750 per day pre-Ivan was really good), I am more than happy to see these numbers go down for the reasons mentioned above.

I am curious to see how long it takes for the numbers to return to pre-Ivan levels. I'm guessing 2 weeks to a month. But maybe we picked up a few more 'returning customers' out of this and our normal stats will be up permanently.

Jamaicans.com and Stormcarib.com have sent a good number of visitors our way, but the biggest shocker to me was that BBC.com did as well. Someone must have posted a link to us in one of their 'Your thoughts about this story' message boards. 1000 people came from them.

The server was 'overloaded', which means it was unable to do its job and send out web pages and take message postings, about 60 times over the last week. Not bad considering the traffic. I'm wondering how much total bandwidth we chewed up with all of it...and if our hosting company is going to charge us a bit more this month. A very minor worry at this point.

So apologies if you had a mesage get lost or were unable to get to our site over the last week...but you had a lot of competition!

Thanks to all who have used this site for its intended purpose: to use the Internet to help Treasure Beach in all ways possible.

-Eric

NOTE: hits are touted by people as a reflection of web site activity, but aren't really an accurate barometer. If you go to a single web page that has 10 pictures on it, then its counted as 11 hits, one for the page itself and one for each of the pictures. Pageviews or Visitors are better indicators.

Here's a graphic showing the number of visitors per day for September. Guess which day Ivan hit...