Well its been almost 6 weeks since we moved www.sportbusiness.com from an old and dying Oracle/Solaris system onto Drupal. The old system was pretty poor. We send out a daily "newsline" (summary of today's sport news) and it almost always took the site out. Moving it across to drupal had its fair share of issues - but went pretty well with hindsight. I personally learned a lot and it also lead to the birth of Global Redirect amongst some other custom modules. The site is flourishing now!
On release, our stats package showed the site getting around 1,000 unique visitors a day. As of this week, we seem to have comfortably broken the 6,000 a day boundry.
Before, the site had a single RSS feed for latest news, thanks to Drupal's fantastic ability to categorise the world, we now also have RSS feeds dedicated for categories - for example, if you're interested in sport news in China or you only want to be updated when there is new sport business news on Soccer. Drupal has also allowed us to easily open up all the content. Sportbusiness.com has over 25,000 news items which before would have been spread over hundreds of pages which google would probably have got bored indexing. Drupal has allowed far more content to be indexed!
In terms of the powerhouse running the site. We have a dedicated Apache (2.0) server running on a dual CPU Athlon Opteron 270 3400+ which also seems to be dual core. The server load on this has never really been much over 0.2. The database is another dedicated server running a single CPU Athlon Opteron 270 3400+ (also dual core). At launch this server was under a pretty high load - but the talk at DrupalCon by MTV-UK and the Lullabot Crew suggested that the MySQL Cache could make a huge difference - and a difference it made! After enabling the cache at 10Mb the site immediately halved in load time. After speaking with the techies at Rackspace (our hosts), the guru's there made a few other minor tweaks with the thread cache too and we decided to up the mem cache to 128Mb (the server has plenty spare). This impact wasn't as much - however after tracking the server load I was shocked at the impact. Our database server now sits at about 0.05 load on average and spikes to 0.1 when our newsline email goes out.
We are still implementing new features on the site (for example, my colleague Nikos is currently doing a fantastic job getting the Flash Gallery to display our Reports section... in fact I just checked - he's DONE a fantastic job getting the Flash Gallery module to work with the Reports section!).
I think that about covers it... In the pipeline is the conversion of the PP Online website - less content by a MUCH higher traffic level! That could be interesting :-)
Comments
Hi, congratulation on your
Hi,
congratulation on your site conversion to drupal.
How did you get the 600% visitor increase in 6 weeks ? That's impressive and I wish to know if you did anything special like a press release or such.
Cordially,
Brakkar
No press release needed!
Nope - no press release.
On the old site the problem was that you could only get to the archive of news by filtering by date (via a form) - google cant use forms! The new site (as you can see) is full of category pages and links to articles are much easier to get to. Basic SEO.
Google can look at our site and see pages devoted to news of different topics - for example, if you google for "london 2012 news" at google.co.uk, we're on the front page for it (we weren't before Drupal). Thats because I setup a view which picks up all stories that are 2012 related and displays them. We've applied this technique to all categories, eg a page dedicated for news related to Football, China and even thingsl ike Street Luge! In fact, according to our stats, the most popular category page is actually the China News Feed!
Simply making the content accessible like this made a HUGE difference.
Problem?
Some of your views give me a blank page.
Even the one from Google: http://www.sportbusiness.com/2012
Might just be me, or might be widespread. Better check into it.
I think it might just be you...
I think it might just be you... It seems to work fine for me (I just tried emptying the cache too).
I have just tried a bug fix for the views module - I noticed the error log was getting flooded with loads of "WARNING: Arguement missing" errors. It wasn't causing an issue - just annoying me and wasting hard disk space! :-)
Cheers for pointing it out, it might be a location based issue (ie a flaw in the connectivity between our webserver and you).
Its working ok now. Best of
Its working ok now. Best of luck with the site
Cheers
Cheers :-)