Two months ago, I wrote a simple tutorial on how to create a Hadoop MapReduce program using Netbeans. Not a slightest clue in my head that this post will change my life. Okay, I’m exaggerating. I mean the post change the history of this blog.
The first day after I wrote the post, nothing special happened. But the day after, I was shocked when I checked this blog stats. This blog usually have about 15-25 visitors a day. So I was amazed when I saw 90 visitors that day. I started to investigate which post has the biggest contribution in delivering traffics. And I found out that it was the Hadoop in Netbeans post. I noticed that all of the traffic came from one site called DZone. DZone? I never heard that site before. When I was investigating the site, I found that it’s a cool bookmarking site for developer around the globe. And someone, later I known as mitchp, just share my post into this site.
The magic continued the next day. My traffic keep increasing. Then later in that day, I got an email from my hosting provider:
The domain arifn.web.id has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit (807.50/1000.00 Megs).
Well, my bandwidth limit was just 1 GB a month. So I double checked the hosting package and found that my bandwidth limit should be 2 GB. I contacted my hosting provider to make sure that they didn’t make any mistakes. They said that my bandwidth should be 2 GB and they will resolve it a.s.a.p. Okay, so I started installing WP Super Cache to prevent my site from being down because of the high traffic and low bandwidth limit.
The magic ended. The highest peak was on the third day, near 200 visitors. After that, the traffic declining and found its equilibrium state. But, this state is higher than my average traffic before. My average traffic now is about 20-35 visitors a day. Not bad, huh?
And now, I’m a fan of DZone. Some days ago, I found out that I’m not the only one who has this kind of experience. Yeah, of course. Jordi Cabot wrote in his blog about his DZone traffic experience:
Unfortunately, a completely different story is the mid and long-term impact. By this I mean the number of people that discovered my portal thanks to the link and that has become a frequent visitor of the site since then. This is very difficult to assess (there is no way to know if a new subscriber originally discover your site thanks to the DZone link or it is just a temporal coincidence that he/she joined the site around those dates) but if we look at the increase in the number of subscribers to the RSS portal feeds , my twitter account or the daily visits to the site, my estimation is that only a 2-3% of the original DZone visitors has converted into new portal followers.
I second that. Maybe it’s just a sweet temporal coincidence if my traffic growth above the average. But one thing that I can learn from this experience is that if you want to have a high amount of traffic, you should write a good post regularly. And I hope I can do that.
Do you have the same experience?
