I stopped by speedtest.net recently to see how my connection is doing.

Speedtest.net results

I know that speedboost is supposed to speed up small files, but this much? It absolutely sucks when I’m trying to move a few hundred megs up/down from my servers, but regardless this was pretty damn fast.

What drives me nuts is that they will boost my speed up to 20Mb/second for some small files when I would just settle for 1Mb/second consistantly. If I try to FTP/SFTP a few hundred files to my server, my speeds will drop to dial-up or worse.

Trying to compete on theoretical limits is like trying to compete with free. Don’t do it. Sell me a consistent, reliable, unthrottled connection and I may go with you because I want to instead of the lack of options. Do that, and I’ll be impressed.

Something is up with PC Club…again. We’ve been here before and I think the niche that they fill will be void in their absence, especially here in Salem, Oregon where a majority of the computer shops are either box stores or junk resellers. I’ve seen a couple of new computer stores open, but they don’t seem to have websites or any marketing going on. Here are some strange screenshots from pcclub.com that only seem to reinforce the events.

Only two systems available

No Stores #1

No Stores #2

By all accounts, yesterdays GMail outage was pretty big. It just so happens that I ranked in the first few results in the SERPs for keywords related to the outage. The traffic influx was huge.

Media Temple (the SKFox.com host) uses a system called GPUs or Grid Processing Units to give you a good idea of how much CPU, I/O, and disk space you are using on their system. Yesterdays spike is fairly obvious.

Mint, from haveamint.com, gave me my first clue as to what was going on. While I like the depth of Google Analytics, the real time stats from my Mint installation are priceless.

SKFox.com normally gets about 100 visitors per day. At the peak of the outage, I was getting about 23 per minute. That’s awesome, but hopefully there isn’t another repeat anytime soon.