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E-KNOW readership strength forces server upgrade
East Kootenay News Online Weekly (e-KNOW) has been experiencing lags and brief periods of down time the past few weeks, all due to a continued surge in readership.
“You’re a victim of your own success,” noted Genex Marketing owner Chris Botterill, e-KNOW’s tech-wizard and site designer, explaining that larger volumes of traffic coming to the website are creating issues with our server, which must be upgraded to handle that traffic and the massive load of data that e-KNOW has become.
In the past 30 days the online-only newspaper, nearing its third birthday in July this year, had 294,061 page views and 77,727 unique visitors (readers) as per Google Analytics.
“While strong and loyal readership is something every newspaper strives for, it has also put a strain on our server. As a result, Chris is upgrading our server today (Feb. 18),” said e-KNOW owner and editor Ian Cobb.
Since opening for business in July 2011, e-KNOW has grown from having zero readers to tens of thousands a month, with almost 11,000 social media and e-mail subscribers.
“Because we are such a photo-heavy website, with at least one image appearing with every story, our archives, with more than 6,000 stories, has become in a short time a massive collection of data,” Cobb said, explaining that when the website lags or goes off-line, it is because of spikes in readership. Downtimes are generally only a few minutes in length.
For example, on Feb. 6 alone more than 30,000 visitors accessed the website, setting the table for the server upgrade.
Traffic to the website has increased over 180% in the last four months alone.
“Our apologies to readers if they are coming to our site and finding it down or an older version, Â cached in the Cloud, appearing. Chris and his Genex team are working on it and the website should be back to normal soon,” Cobb said. “This is one of those ‘problems’ that one can’t get too upset about because it is a sign that readers are truly catching onto the concept of an online-only newspaper.
“E-KNOW‘s readers are mostly centred in the East Kootenay, but a large number of ‘ex-pats’ or people who used to live in the region are tuning in, literally, from around the world, as well as, I suspect, tourists and regular visitors from Alberta. We also have a large readership from the Lower Mainland, Victoria, the Okanagan and Central (West) Kootenay. More Americans, mostly from Montana and Idaho, are also checking us out on a regular basis,” Cobb said.
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