Robb Knight
Maker of web things, blogger, podcaster, and pizzaiolo. Cat dad and human dad.
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When I wrote this post about justdelete.me I assumed that would pretty much be the best I could hope for in terms of traffic. 3000 visitors in 24 hours was an amazing response to get.The last few days? We’ve been doing that in half an hour.
The coverage in the news has been insane. We were picked up by Minimal Mac on Monday and the traffic stayed pretty steady for the next couple of days. Then we were featured in WIRED which skyrocketed traffic. From there, many of the other tech blogs picked up the story and we ended up at number one on Hacker News, trending on GitHub, number one on Pinboard popular and Christina Warren was interviewed about the site on Varney and Co on Fox Business. Other sites that picked it up include TechCrunch, Mashable and Gigaom. I was also interviewed for The Tech Tailor podcast. All of the links I have found about the site are on Pinboard tagged as justdeleteme.
I’ve got a little confession to make. I’ve never had more than 10 visitors on my site at the same time (except that one time Panic linked to me and the site died immediately). My hosting was costing me $1.50 a month. The server held up until around Thursday night when CPU usage was at 100%. Ed, Mike and myself all jumped on a Skype call to work out what to do. Stupidly, I hadn’t even made the site static (thinking that hardly anyone would be interested) so we immediately converted it to static. We then cloned the site to MediaTemple, changed the name servers and waited. It took about 2 days for it to fully transfer over but the majority of traffic was going to MT which has held up really well. Since we moved the site, we’ve used over 80gb of bandwidth even though the site is only around 200kb.
We’re going to continue adding services from pull requests (We’ve done 130 from 61 different contributors so far) and I will open email submission again soon. We now have over 180 services listed (the current count is shown in the console on page load if you’re interested) which I’m sure will expand in the coming weeks. In terms of making some money to cover hosting and analytics costs we’re going to see how the traffic is in a week or two when the frenzy has died down and make a decision then.
Terms of Service; Didn’t Read are looking at integrating our data with theirs to keep as much information up to date as possible. The JustDelete.me Chrome Extension is receiving some great feedback and Mike is currently considering creating versions for Firefox and Safari.
We have been tracking visitor numbers with GoSquared. GoSquared are a real-time analytics company and they have been awesome in terms of supporting us and helping with upgrades. I can’t recommended, and thank, them enough. The top sources of traffic for the last 10 days are:
We’ve had visitors from at least 150 countries with United States, Germany and Italy making up the top three. Here’s a chart showing the last 10 day’s visitors, uniques and page views:
Some other random snippets of information about the site: