Hi all!
A story about how it can goes too with the wx-site(s) providing live data :lol:
History
As known, my wx-site with live data (wx + Boltek) and Nordic network get kicked off “normal shared webhosting” last year due to “too much hits on certain files like clientraw.txt” and other crap explaintions and i moved over to an virtual server.
That has runned fine and to same boat joined also few more Finnish wx-sites for same reasons and we have been happy on the virtual since that. As today we are 5 Finnish wx-sites w stormtracker on that server what also has been upgraded to an dedicated server recently.
Before this summer (2010) i tought the traffic records of around 12000 pageviews in a day and 80000 pv on month basis what i had was quite good and should “maybe” not so easyly been broken. How wrong i was.
This summer (thunderseason) the sites on the virtual seemed trafficrushes what i only have could dream of. And this affected all the stormtracker-pages on virtual server, not only my nordicweather.
We all use Histats-traffictracker what has the ability to follow ex. “users online” in realtime.
And here are the new totally increadible records for my nordicweather.net:
Most users online: 1100
Pageviews in 24h: 70000
Pageviews in one month: 400000
Visitors in one month: 170000
And this with a pure wx-site.
In August we pushed out data of totally 740 GB from those 5 sites.
:lol:
Henkka
Awesome stats!!!
Great work as always Henkka!!
We all benefit from your hard work and time that you put in. It is very much appreciated!
Tom
Congratulations on the success of the site.
Thanks guys!
By moving first to virtual server and now to dedicated have of course also gived some cool new possibilities, like more power to run the masterscript of Nordic network, what maybe is not so light when pull data from 200 stations every few minutes 
But also, the GFS-maps i have on my site are created serverside, i run the OpenGrads-software directly on the server so no need to upload hundreds of images every update. As “side-product” i put up a GrADS-dataserver for interested Nordic weathersites from where they can get the data much faster than loading it from NOAA in the US what could be quite slow sometimes. Theese are runned totally automagicly in background and almost zero service needed once get them up.
And not forgetting how learnful and fun it has been, when get the virtual server i had almost zero knowledge about Linux/serverstuff, else than what few plays with Ubuntu on homepc. Google has been a good friend and after found a few websites with good explainsions like “how to setup a perfect server” it has been really easy to manage. It needs of course more managing & monitoring than “normal webhotel” but its easy after all and it gives the freedom to choose what software(s) are running, can choose when update what or don’t update at all.
henkka
I had the site on a ded server for years, so it could handle the big peaks we get sometimes, but I recently moved to a Cloud server, which is kinda of a VPS but is redundant and I can add CPUs to it on the fly, so during a big peaks I can instantly upscale it. The Cloud setup is cheaper than dedicated, plus you don’t have to worry about the server crashing … its just like a ded server you have full root access can reboot it etc.
Cheers
Steve