Too busy to write a blog post...

Wow, it's been 22 days since I last wrote a blog post, you can guess the reason for that: I've been busy!

On the player side things seem to work out nicely, I've seen players from 2005-2006 return, and the online players list is steady at more or less 300 players (max was 421 players). People are reporting possible improvements on a daily basis, and I've already updated over 25% of all pages since September 1st (and over 50% of all pages since I gained control).

As for my side of things, I've been seeing a lot of good numbers, I'll list a few:
- Direct traffic to TMN has gone up to 81%, where linking websites take roughly 14% of the traffic, and search engines the remaining 5%;
- Google Adsense reports that 15 million ads have been displayed on TMN (an average of 555,000 a day!);
- Most TMN players are from the UK, USA, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Canada, Finland;
- We're still consuming roughly 11GB of bandwidth each day;
- We have had roughly 6400 unique visitors since September 1st;

Bullet Factories
Yesterday was the big day for anyone wanting a Bullet Factory; everyone ranked hitman+ had a fair chance at winning one. Although my alarm didn't go off at 10AM, and I wasn't awake yet at noon, I did manage to complete the entire process before 12:40.
The next few hours were very interesting; anyone who held a BF seemed to have a cross-hair on their heads, and most of them died. It was a very interesting day (for anyone who didn't get shot).

Two players haven't claimed their BF yet, they have one more day to collect it (or the 8th and 9th winners of the lottery will get it). The 4th winner violated the TOS (just a small violation, but still) so he didn't get his BF.

Marc

Properties, Performance, Bandwidth

Properties
I will start dropping properties on today (September 6th), but this process will take at least a few weeks. That way players will get a chance to rank to Hitman too. I will use a random order, and I will not drop (for instance) London before Amsterdam or New York. Messages regarding the dropping of properties are not answered, as it's unfair to give one player a bigger chance of getting a property than others. Please don't ask me (or any mod) what time the next property will drop, or what property is next.

Bandwidth and performance
Being Dutch, saving money is in my nature. That's why we are running on a (cheap) hosting package with only 300 megabytes of space, and 6 gigabytes of bandwidth each month. Of course the possibility of reaching the 6GB limit crossed my mind, but I didn't expect it to hit 6GB each day!

At the moment we are consuming betwen 10 and 13GB a day. This results in over 300GB of bandwidth each month. Going with the 'official' prices, this will make the hosting package about 8 times more expensive (still reasonably priced though). A somewhat surprising fact is, that the traffic is not caused by images; it's simply the pages that are loaded (16,353,539 in 5 days)! Although I am trying to improve this, it seems like we'll be upgrading big time soon. I'm thinking a VPS is probably better than the hosting package. The hosting provider offered to discuss it by the end of this month, so we'll have to wait for that...

Marc