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66.000 visitors / month? Start a Linux related site on a LEB
I am suprised by my Piwik statistics these last few months. Where earlier this year I had about a thousand visitors per month, that slowly increased to that number per day. And now it has grown even more:
The most popular pages are the VPN tutorials and the SSL tutorials:
Lowendtalk generates quite a bit of referrals:
Windows and Chrome are most used:
How is this Low End you ask? Most of my servers running Raymii.org (9 at this time) have =< 512 MB RAM. A few of them have more, but those are given servers or used for a different purpose (backups, Syncthing, Piwik, cipherli.st) and run the site as an extra.
The software used? NGINX latest with a lot of caching. The site is a static one, generated by my own software.
However, the adsense revenue is about $10/month, which seems quite low to me.
Any tips for me to keep this going? What kind of articles do you like to see? Layout changes? Other suggestions?
Comments
Technical blogs should be kept as simple and clean as possible - you're not a web designer nor do you promote design related stuff.
As for your no. of visitors, keep writing high quality articles - check out the "latest bugs or problems" and post proper solutions.
Other than that, CHEERS!
Do you really need 9 servers to run the site? Your pageviews come down to 2/min which even a single server running Nginx with 64 MB should be able to handle
Good to hear! I always enjoy your tutorials.
I can't think of anything you could, to be honest. If I think of something, I'll let you know!
Read it all and it makes more sense, like most things in life
Especially since it's all static. 9 servers to run a web site is not "on a LEB".
This is what I was thinking. Say you have two LE* servers (main + backup) that should easily come in at below $120/yr so $10/m isn't bad
Congrats on the growth.
I was one of those visitors this month, originally headed for cipherli.st but also stopped by raymii.org to see what's new. Thanks for the tutorials. It's good to read other people's approaches, makes fun weekend projects to try some different setup.
I am surprise to see the adsense revenue. Have you optimize ad placement? What countries gives you most visitors?
It is... he's just balancing the load.
I think its great he's using 9 servers because that allows him to expand with out even thinking about it.
Would love to have that amount of visitors to Lowendguide.
Congrats on the accomplishment!
I think he means 9 servers including 'utility servers' like a Piwik server and the like.
I'd assume that most LEB people use ad blockers or would not click ads, that's why the revenue is so low. A $10/year VPS should be enough (at least I run WP, several static sites, a Jabber server and postfix/dovecot on one).
I think it's a case of premature optimization. Or rather something of a reverse kind, throwing a crazy amount of resources at the "problem" without even testing or measuring if any of that is really needed.
Personally I am serving about 17000 visitors per month on a Kidechire, and that's not with just a static site, all dynamically generated with a bit of parser caching built-in in the Dokuwiki. And no ads of any kind, too.
I learned how to use duplicity from raymii.org, thanks!
How about add a disqus comment box below the article?
If readers have question about a tutorial, they could leave a message there, I always find useful imformation in comments, it makes the tutorial more complete and you could know what are readers interested in.
There are a lot of tutorials about:
How to install LEMP on debian 7
How to install pure-ftpd
How to change file permisson
...
But there is no tutorial (or rare) about how to solve them all, take wordpress for example:
If one guy solve wordpress upgrade problem by run
chown -R www-data:www-data public_htmlthen his ftp user may loss permission.
And wordpress need not only LEMP, exim4, memcache, apc, fail2ban, backuppc... could make settings more complicated, especially when multi sites are hosted on one box.
So I like more articles combine tutorials together.
in terms of ad placement I think the 250x250 on the left should be just above the RSS feed link, on your home page a small line of text based ads below the 'about' paragraph and on every post a horizontal line of text based ads ad the bottom of each article.
the right hand side is wasted prime advert space for that sort of site, you could probably get around 4 - 8 x $5 - $10 125x125 boxes down there, I would pay for one via BSA.
Also, people who are smart enough to be interested in Linux tutorials are smart enough to run AdBlock Plus.
raymii.org Is on my favourites bar, has been for a while.
Tip: credit the sources you used to write your articles.
sadly
if you are using text based ads. switch to rich media ads. it has a lot impact. and you can use up to 3 ads in each page
Depends, I do use ad block however I do not apply it to sites I find valuable. That is not to say I go out of my way to click ads but I figure if the site is good enough to me then I should be in some way good to it.
9 servers, that's indeed high end specs. We usually use 1 or 2 to handle that traffic, let alone most of that is even static content.
Meh, I don't even notice ads when I'm browsing the net. I only installed adbock plus a couple of days ago so I could see if my site was formatting properly without the ads.
Low end boxes, not-so-lowend maintenance/upkeep. Just keeping Piwik updated and secure can be a PITA
Don't get me wrong, I admire your work....
I find your site equally as useful tbh.
I've seen your site pop up multiple times on Reddit
(And received everytime a upvote from me)
However I have no idea what you could do to improve it or add. I'm visited your site multiple times but mostly to check if there is any new content and/or to see if it is interesting. (Something about using idle vps's)
I do like clarification why 9 servers? Running a site with around 200.000 hits/month on a simple 128mb RamNode vps.
I don't know if I am smart enough, but I do not use adblockers. I think that when a website offers me something useful and / or interesting, then, I should -at least- reward him letting the advertisments show on my browser. Even if I think that google ads are day by day less profitable, both for clients or web site owners (I do not use in my news portals any google ads but I have targeted ads by local clients that are paying much more and are being see by specific target group).
You're right, however, it is a hobby. Some people collect model trains, I do with vps's. Plus, most of them are either given or are cheap enough (<$15/year). And, of course, the geo-loda-balancing is a nice plus as well.
The Piwik server is the only server that runs on a single node... It is the only thing that sometimes has trouble with the load, but that's because it needs to be upgraded...