I am looking for tips on how to sustain a growth rate because as your revenue grows, it is a lot more difficult to sustain the rate. If you have goals such as a 100% revenue increase monthly, what would be the first steps to take? Build more sites, drive more traffic, or a mixture of both? Because most likely a lot of webmasters are stuck at a certain level and they can't level up for whatever reason. For a 100% monthly growth rate: $1 -> $2 = very easy $10 -> $20 = still relatively easy $100 -> $200 = getting harder $1000 -> $2000 = very hard $10000 -> $20000 = impossible? At $20000, your next month's goal is $40000, and then $80000, am I dreaming of sustaining these growth rates?
I'd say a combination of more sites and more traffic. The problem is, the more sites you make, the more work it is to promote them. I re-submit to search engines once per month and with 4 sites (soon to be 5 ) it takes a bit of time entering data into submission forms and following the resulting confirmation emails. So there you have it. The more pages you have, the more impressions you get thus more chance for someone to click however there's no use in creating 10,000 pages if nobody knows they are there.
Well my current problem is keeping an eye on the servers and making sure all the websites load properly. Pinging is no good, it can't tell if apache is down or not. Any tips from the big players on how to manage many sites at once?
I would say the mixture of both. But as dzcap pointed out its also important that you provide pages fast. So, build more sites, drive more traffic but remember to Build Unique and Good Content. That is just god.
The best way to sustain a growth rate is to have content that is good enough to generate natural inbound links.
Good content, make sure it is all relevant and on topic to the site's theme. As alway, more traffic = more revenue. Monitoring - can be done using an external service (some are still free for minimal checks)- or if you know PHP/Perl and have a buddy you can reciprocally check each others servers for HTTP reponses etc. Managing - if you're technical you could write your own scripts or if you are using blogs there are products to manage them from a central location... sorry the names escape me... anyone? On the goal setting, you might want to take it easy on the doubling... By step 6 you are looking to go from 100k to 200k per month! -- of course I hope you end up with that problem.
I especially have problem with server swapping to the max. When that happens, the site is still pingable but you can't access the site! Are there any tools to monitor if the site is loading? I realize it is a lot more harder to sustain 100% growth, so perhaps lowering it as the revenue goes up might be a good idea? Like 100% > 75% > 50% > 33% > etc.
Your server needs more RAM dzcap. What have you got in it? 32mb or something? Honestly, it's an idea to tell us what OS etc when asking such techy questions.
If you can manage a little script/batch programming, you can use the GNU "wget" open source tool to automate the checking of sites. The wget application fetches the file at a given URL and returns information about the web server return code and response headers as well as the file itself. It was designed to be used in scripts for monitoring and mirroring websites.
I am auto reloading the logo of all the sites every 5 minutes right now and that seems to do the trick for now. I still don't know how to monitor mysql yet. Any idea?
Not to rain on your parade Eric, but if you are going to the trouble of writing a script, why take the extra step of running wget when you can get all the info via the script, including response codes etc... As for mysql you could try and connect on the default 3306 port or, if you are already writing scripts, you could set up the following concept: On the server: When a "checker" page is called do - Read date/time from mysql table row - display on the accessed web page Update the new date/time to the same mysql table row On the checking server: get the "checker" web page containing the above script, read the date/time compare the new date/time against the one fromthe previous run if it doesn't match send and alert if it does, update the db with the new date/time from the server - go again Set the checking server using cron and away you go... Ok, this is waaaay off topic for adsense - I only put this on the post as it may be useful to others - I don't want some cranky pants giving me more red so PM me if you need further explanation steve
Great info, got my programmer working on it now. Don't worry too much on the reputation, my last neg was for posting that I paid money for a YPN invite, I mean WTF?? You shouldn't let them affect you, so don't lose any sleep over it.
I think you should create a course like site with lots of pages and the index page as contents. Also you could tell your visitors to use SHIFT while clicking any link as to keep your site open. Notice that I told to 'tell your visitors to use SHIFT while clicking any link ' not any ad. This means that you are following googles terms.
Um, that's exactly what you use wget for -- within the script, to get the response code. If you're using a scripting language with built-in HTTP support, then you don't need wget, obviously, but for a simple Bourne/Korn/C shell or DOS batch file you will need wget. For example, I have a shell script running on my Linux server that runs every five minutes and uses wget to check to see if my Tomcat server's still up and restarts it if not. Handy thing, that wget.
You're using "server" in a different sense. In my case, the "server" I'm referring to is the software. The "server" you're referring to is the hardware. As long as the computer itself is up, you can have scripts running on it that regularly check to see if the software is up. If the computer itself is down then there's not much you can do, however you can have a script running on a different computer checking occasionally to see if the first computer's up. Really, though, your hosting service should be doing that level of monitoring, not you.
I use http://nagios.org to monitor about 60 servers, works perfectly and there are plugins for monitoring just about everything. It'll require some knowledge to setup though.