Web Performance News for the Week of February 3, 2014 – LoadStorm

National Signing Day for high school athletes is like Christmas and birthdays all wrapped into one.  Websites like 247Sports.com and Scout.com had their writers covering stories and updating every minute. On one of the biggest day for the recruiting industry, the top dog website Rivals lagged behind. Out of all 365 days, National Signing Day resulted in a strong overflow on their message boards causing a bottleneck that brought down the site. Rivals.com team diagnosed the problem and decided that the best way to stabilize and fix the issue was to temporarily shut down the message boards while making Premium content available to all paid subscribers.

While some users were still able to access content, Head of Rivals.com, Eric Winter immediately addressed the problem and directed readers to their mobile website.

Rivals.com has an estimated 200,000 subscribers, twice the subscribers of 2nd and 3rd placed Scout.com and 247Sports.com.  While Rivals was continuing to fix their website, 247Sports had their website flow in with 1 million unique visitors and had close to 15 million pageviews on National Signing Day. It’s safe to assume some of the traffic could’ve been Rivals, but due to the technology and unexpected traffic flow, Any big event like this will bring down websites if left unprepared. Eric Winter told AL.com before National Signing Day that the technology that they were carrying was out of date. As a frequent visitor to Rivals.com, I’m optimistic that there will be some changes in the future because of this event.

Is Your Dog Surfing The Net Without You Knowing?

There’s a saying that goes “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” How true is this? Can dogs really surf the internet? New data shows that humans are only accounting for 38.5% of all web traffic. This can only mean your dog is in fact, surfing on the net. Right!? Sadly no, the other 61.5% of web traffic is actually coming from bots.  In 2012, 49% of web traffic were coming from humans, while 51% were bots.

You might be thinking that the majority of these bots are bad, but most of them are actually good bots. The good bots are out their indexing websites, to help users find more accurate and relevant information. The bad bots like spam bots are actually decreasing. Only 1% of spam bots account for internet activity. Next time when you’re on Google to find an answer, think of bots bringing back information that’s high quality and up-to-date.

Nonetheless, it’s still important to play it safe. Besides malicious spam bots, there are scrapers, hacking tools, and impersonators. Scrapers generally steal and duplicate content. They will also steal emails for spam purposes. Hacking tools are used to hijack servers and steal credit cards. Finally, impersonators are the ones driving down the website with bandwidth consumption with hopes to bring a website to a downtime.

Just like humans, the actions that bots take can be good or bad. With statistics showing that human traffic is accounting for less web traffic, the future will have some interesting consequences if the pattern continues.