May 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 10,860,869
• Total Files: 10,143,164
• Total Pages: 735,381
• Total Visits: 208,951
• Total KBytes: 39,734,204
• Total Unique Sites: 159,587
• Total Unique URLs: 18,455
• Total Unique Referrers: 31,496
• Total Unique User Agents: 6,488

May 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 350,350 – Max: 444,741
• Files per Day: Average: 327,198 – Max: 417,216
• Pages per Day: Average: 23,721 – Max: 28,148
• Visits per Day: Average: 6,740 – Max: 8,153
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,281,749 – Max: 1,448,784

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with April 2009.

Previous month site traffic: April 2009

April 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 10,377,687
• Total Files: 9,487,998
• Total Pages: 708,306
• Total Visits: 187,375
• Total KBytes: 39,167,115
• Total Unique Sites: 154,940
• Total Unique URLs: 17,576
• Total Unique Referrers: 29,626
• Total Unique User Agents: 6,345

April 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 345,922 – Max: 471,712
• Files per Day: Average: 316,266 – Max: 357,843
• Pages per Day: Average: 23,610 – Max: 29,840
• Visits per Day: Average: 6,245 – Max: 6,798
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,305,570 – Max: 1,558,673

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with March 2009.

Previous month site traffic: March 2009

I am hosting lesterchan.net on ex-FRRO shared/reseller server, now it can be considered a dedicated server that I am sharing together with Michael Feng. I have also a shared hosting account with a dedicated IP sponsored by Vodien Internet Solutions (which has excellent and fast customer service by the way). The FRRO server is using DirectAdmin while Vodien uses cPanel.

I have been Googling for days to find a way to replicate my files and databases from DirectAdmin (FRRO) To cPanel (Vodien) on a daily basis, but unfortunately I can’t find a way to do it. So I decided to think out of the box/back to basic and not do use DirectAdmin to cPanel but rather use rsync and mysqldump from one server to another.

I stumbled upon this article by HowtoForge entitled, Mirror Your Web Site With rsync. I followed the tutorial closely and it works perfectly, my files are mirrored from FRRO to Vodien everyday at midnight.

Within the same article, there are links to How To Set Up Database Replication In MySQL and How To Set Up A Load-Balanced MySQL Cluster. But unfortunately these tutorials requires root access to both servers which I do not have.

I thought of another idea which is to use mysqldump (at FRRO) to backup the database to a folder which will be included in the mirroring using rsync. After the rsync runs, the backup file should already be copied over to Vodien. Over at Vodien, I will use mysql to restore the database. This is quite a tiring process.

23:50 – Run mysqldump at FRRO (backup database)
00:00 – Run rsync at Vodien (mirror files)
00:30 – Run mysql at Vodien (restore database)

Notice that I give the cron jobs a buffer of 10 minutes for the backup database to happen before rsync and 30 minutes for the rsync to takes place before restoring the database.

Still not satisfied with the efficiency, I continued Googling for better solutions and I found an article by DevShed entitled, Backing Up and Restoring Your MySQL Database, in particular this paragraph:

Moving Data Directly Between Databases
How would you like to replicate your present database to a new location? When you are shifting web hosts or database servers, you can directly copy data to the new database without having to create a database backup on your machine and restoring the same on the new server. mysql allows you to connect to a remote database server to run sql commands. Using this feature, we can pipe the output from mysqldump and ask mysql to connect to the remote database server to populate the new database. Let’s say we want to recreate the Customers database on a new database server located at 202.32.12.32, we can run the following set of commands to replicate the present database at the new server

mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers | mysql –host=202.32.12.32 -C Customers

And that is when I realized I can pipe the output of mysqldump of FRRO to the MYSQL server of Vodien. But before that can take place, you need to set the allowed host in Remote MYSQL in cPanel. In this case, I added the IP of FRRO as well as the hostname to the allowed host in Vodien’s cPanel.

I tested the MYSQL piping and it works perfectly! So now the cron jobs are reduced to just two.

00:00 – Run rsync at Vodien (mirror files)
00:10 – Run mysqldump at FRRO (pipe MYSQL database)

Here is my rsync cron job command that will run at midnight everyday:

/usr/bin/rsync -avz –delete -e "ssh -i /path/to/key/mirror-rsync-key" username@domain.com:/home/username/domain.com/public_html/ /home/username/public_html/

Here is my mysqldump cron job command that will run at 00:10 everyday:

/usr/bin/mysqldump –user="mysql_username" –password="mysql_password" –opt –all-databases | /usr/bin/mysql –host=192.168.1.1 –user="mysql_username" –password="mysql_password"

*UPDATE*

Uzyn suggested a more secured and faster way of “piping” the MYSQL database:

/usr/bin/mysqldump | gzip > /path/to/d.gz; ssh user@mirror "scp user@primary:/path/to/d.gz; mysql < gunzip -c d.gz"

What this command does is basically, gzip your database, ssh/scp it over to the backup server and gunzip it from there. It is quite similar to my rsync method mentioned previously.

March 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 10,433,420
• Total Files: 9,562,753
• Total Pages: 687,906
• Total Visits: 193,613
• Total KBytes: 40,087,921
• Total Unique Sites: 162,377
• Total Unique URLs: 16,589
• Total Unique Referrers: 30,815
• Total Unique User Agents: 6,523

March 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 336,561 – Max: 403,055
• Files per Day: Average: 308,475 – Max: 308,475
• Pages per Day: Average: 22,190 – Max: 29,456
• Visits per Day: Average: 6,245 – Max: 7,914
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,293,159 – Max: 1,961,071

Note: Green denotes increase and Red denotes decrease when compared with February 2009.

Previous month site traffic: February 2009

After almost 24 hours of downtime, finally the site is back online. We are there at REACH Datacenter to remove the server at 10pm and after that we reached Qala Datacenter about 11pm. 2 mistakes on our part, firstly we did not bring any CentOS installation DVD to install on Derrick Server and hence we wasted about 2 hours to download the file via torrent at 500KB/s. Since all of us are using old laptops, it took us about 45 minutes just to burn and verify the DVD. The first DVD that we burnt using Michael laptop, the server has problem reading it. Only at the second attempt using my laptop, it works. Hence we wasted another 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The second and biggest mistake of all is we (Derrick and I) forgot to change our Direct Admin license registered IP, the license is still being tag to our old server and hence DirectAdmin cannot start. By this time it is about 4am and everybody is tired, decided to pack up at 5am and went home, after dropping Derrick at Jurong East interchange Michael and I went to my mom office to collect his monitor that he has left it there. Derrick called me and say that his Direct Admin license IP has been updated and asked me to check mine, and yeap, mine is updated as well. Michael updated the license on our server and it just took 5 minutes. Went for breakfast after that at the canteen below my mom office as it operates 24 hours. After everything was done, it was about 6am. Sent Michael home and reached home about 7am.

The waiting game is for our local shitty and slow ISP to refresh its DNS records to reflect our new server IP. Apparently, Michael told me that Starhub do that every 15 hours while Singtel do that every 30 hours. It is because of the DNS propagation that makes this site goes down for about 24 hours.

But anyway, the site can now be considered running on a “dedicated” server with a guaranteed 1Mbps line with a shared 10Mbps burstable line and the server is hosting about 10 domains only.

Anyway, if you all need hosting, check out sgWebster Solutions

Michael and I will be moving this server to Qala Datacenter from REACH Datacenter on Friday 27th March 2009. The site is expected to be down for 8 hours from 2200hrs on Friday, 27th March 2009 to 0600hrs on Saturday, 28th March 2009. Hopefully, it will take less than 8 hours.

Notice for Scheduled Maintenance (Friday, 27th March 2009)

DATE: Friday, 27th March 2009 – Saturday, 28th March 2009
TIME: 2200 – 0600 GMT+8
DURATION: Estimated at 8 hours.

REASON FOR MAINTENANCE:
Migration of our shared and resellers account server to Qala Datacenter.

IMPACT OF MAINTENANCE:
No services from shared and resellers account will be available for the duration of the maintenance slot. VPS accounts are NOT affected.

February 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 10,800,627
• Total Files: 9,945,222
• Total Pages: 650,841
• Total Visits: 183,506
• Total KBytes: 40,616,926
• Total Unique Sites: 150,368
• Total Unique URLs: 17,262
• Total Unique Referrers: 32,855
• Total Unique User Agents: 5,951

February 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 385,736 – Max: 548,731
• Files per Day: Average: 355,186 – Max: 516,857
• Pages per Day: Average: 23,244 – Max: 31,281
• Visits per Day: Average: 6,553 – Max: 9,592
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,450,605 – Max: 1,745,542

Note: Green denotes increase and Red denotes decrease when compared with January 2009.

Previous month site traffic: January 2009

January 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 11,276,573
• Total Files: 10,248,325
• Total Pages: 710,401
• Total Visits: 184,462
• Total KBytes: 43,986,533
• Total Unique Sites: 144,281
• Total Unique URLs: 17,814
• Total Unique Referrers: 29,778
• Total Unique User Agents: 6,343

January 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 363,760 – Max: 410,381
• Files per Day: Average: 330,591 – Max: 360,149
• Pages per Day: Average: 22,916 – Max: 33,675
• Visits per Day: Average: 5,950 – Max: 6,660
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,418,920 – Max: 1,876,486

Note: Green denotes increase and Red denotes decrease when compared with December 2008.

Previous month site traffic: December 2008

Some minor updates to lesterchan.net and hence I bump the site version to 3.30:

• Combined these 5 JavaScript files together:
  • Simple AJAX Code-Kit (TW-Sack)
  • ThickBox
  • Docking Boxes (DBX)
  • Docking Boxes Key File
  • lesterchan.net’s JavaScript File
• Minified CSS and JavaScript files using YUI Compressor
• Moved Google Analytics JavaScript code to the footer
• Added “My Wish List” (shopping cart icon) to the Welcome Area
• Changed “Posted By” to “Posted by”
• Added a new poll entitled “How Often You Visit lesterchan.net?”

The remaining optimization involved upgrading my plugins used on this site as well to WordPress 2.8 nightly which is not recommended for a production site and hence I will only further optimize this site’s JavaScript when WordPress 2.8 comes out in March/April.

December 2008 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 10,101,880
• Total Files: 8,967,489
• Total Pages: 691,791
• Total Visits: 170,341
• Total KBytes: 42,551,253
• Total Unique Sites: 137,608
• Total Unique URLs: 17,594
• Total Unique Referrers: 25,856
• Total Unique User Agents: 6,246

December 2008 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 325,867 – Max: 391,865
• Files per Day: Average: 289,273 – Max: 361,267
• Pages per Day: Average: 22,315 – Max: 28,964
• Visits per Day: Average: 5,494 – Max: 6,365
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,372,621 – Max: 1,812,057

Note: Green denotes increase and Red denotes decrease when compared with November 2008.

Previous month site traffic: November 2008