My Journey as a Webmaster (Part Three)
[ Part One ] [ Part Two ] [ Part Three ]
The Birth of NFreak.net
For quite some time things were going great; better than I ever could have imagined. Traffic to my website was constantly on the rise, and I had even developed a small user base of my own; people who would come to my website on a daily basis to socialize. Little did I know that struggles were on the horizon.
The three gigabytes of bandwidth that I was allowed each month started to develop into a huge issue. The first time that it maxed out, people were prevented from coming to my website for almost a full week. This was extremely stressful, as I wanted to ensure that everyone would continue to return, and taking someone away from something for a full week can make them lose interest. Not only that, but I also didn’t want the potential of my website to be limited by bandwidth issues.
But alas, so came the first of the month and I was back in business. I became more and more alert of my precious bandwidth, and I was able to estimate what day of the month that it would go down. This process continued for about two more months before my birthday rolled around along with a new web host and a domain name of my choice. Coincidence? I think not.
I chose the name NFreak.net because NFreak (as in Nintendo Freak) was my nickname on the Nintendo Forums. I kept this new website a secret while I spent the next week or so moving everything to the new web host and making myself a legitimate template. I now had 20 gigabytes of bandwidth per month; about seven times more than I did before.
The website had a great launch, and within weeks I had more than doubled my traffic. Once things had settled down, I went back and consulted with my friend PHP and decided that my top posters list desperately needed an upgrade. I stepped it up a notch, and implemented a cron job that went off every eight hours to update the post counts. There was also a second cron job that triggered once daily and created a separate list for the top posters of that specific day. This little perk allowed for people to see exactly how many posts they made that day, along with their position relative to others. More importantly, it finally gave me a break from manually performing this task everyday, which consumed a good fifteen minutes on average. [ Part four is coming soon. ]
[ Part One ] [ Part Two ] [ Part Three ]
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