Blag

Somehow or other, this blog (blag) has somehow made it into the indexes of over 15 search engines including Google, Yahoo, Live/Bing, Ask, Alexa & Netcraft. Amazing, considering there weren’t any inbound links to theparanoidtroll.com in the beginning yet somehow Google caught on within days of the domain being registered, and all the other followed suit.

Stats make for interesting reading -

• Average of 6-7 unique visitors per day (excludes RSS feeds, and returning visitors)
• 72.8% of visitors use Internet Explorer, 15.2% use Safari, 8% use Firefox, 0.9% use Chrome and the remainder are all random browsers/feed readers
• 95.9% of visitors are Windows users, Macintosh accoutns for 1.2% and <0.1% use Linux. I have no idea what the remainder is.
• Top 5 keywords were  – “cheap”, “discount”, “billion”, “KFC” and ”pointless”
• Top 10 countries are – Australia, US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Russia and Germany

I actually received 3 offers via e-mail from various dodgy SEO companies offering to ‘promote’ my site to make it to the front page of Google. It already does, thank you very much -.- No thanks to you, J. Walker, H. Ellis, and K. Lampton. All you succeeded in doing is wasting 15 kilobytes of space in my inbox.

In other news, more server changes to come

I’ll wait until I’ve moved all my websites and domains away from host “X”, before I tear into them, lambast their shitty service and name them publicly. The server load of 70.34 and memory usage of 88.20% is atrocious, let alone the support staff who ignore support tickets, or take 4-5 days before replying to those marked as ‘crtical’, or the high packet loss and latency. And that’s before I start complaining about corrupted SSL data, terrible PHP/SQL performance and the intermittent FTP service. -.- *rage*

For those not in the know, a typical server packed with hundreds of websites only has a load of 1 to 4, and memory usage around the 40-60% usage mark under normal conditions.

So, time to shift all my domain names to Layered Networks, and move my other sites to IGXHosting. (Free plug for Layered Networks here actually, they have very cheap domain names which come with free WHOIS privacy, which still beat Australian registrars for price, despite the AUD to USD exchange rate and conversion). This blog shouldn’t be affected as it’s already hosted by Layered Networks and the domain is already pointed towards their nameservers. Still, if something does bugger up, max downtime should be 24-48 hours, while your ISP re-caches DNS lookups.

Blag moved sometime in the past 7 days… betcha didn’t know when

Ok, it was last night, and it took all of about 4 minutes to transition a blog, coupla files and a few databases over. And the DNS propogated incredibly quickly too

So… Blag is now in the ‘Telecom Center’ in LA, California.

*Correction to previous post, Liquid Web is in Michigan, not Chicago

*Blag is moving again. From the Liquid Web datacenter in rural Chicago to the Telecom Center in LA California.

Same domain name and URL  – just a different server though.

Los Angeles is much faster for Asia Pacific visitors. That and the fact I get a lifetime 70% discount for moving

US visitors can suck it up – they start whinging as soon as latency goes above 50ms which is insignifcant compared to the 400-650ms required to get to Middle Eastern countries and the Indian region. As for Europe… Chicago or Los Angeles makes no difference to them.

Speaking of latency, I figured out why Unwired WiFi hotpots are so shit in general… more to come on that later.

*May incur 24 hours downtime.

Whirlpool has finally moved host from WebCentral to Bulletproof Networks. I must say, everything feels damn snappier. Their new servers are hosted in the Global Crossing datacentre in Ultimo, and PIPE and Internode arejust a few of the fibre providers for the centre. 10ms ping FTW! Only 2 router hops away

Perhaps we shall finally be rid of ‘High Load’ mode… Bring back the spellchecker please?