FirstNight.org Statistics: 2001

December 2001 (First Night 2002) was the 26th year of the First Night festival and the fifth year of our involvement with the site. The event web site at www.firstnight.org offered database-driven access to the entire schedule of events, a personalized planner feature, artist profiles, maps and other event information.

The Platform

As in the year 2000 First Night required hosting that would fit into their non-profit budget and still support the enormous traffic spike expected during the event itself. We settled for the second year on Communitech.net which offered all the features we needed and handled the previous year's traffic handily.

The site was on a shared, virtual IIS 5.0 server (Windows 2000) along with many other sites. The web server was a Dual Pentium III 500 Compaq Proliant configured with one gigabyte of RAM and fast SCSI disks. The site was written using ColdFusion 4.5 (the previous year's site used CF 4.01). The database, also shared, was MS SQL Server 7.0 and hosted on identical hardware as the web server.

Year 2001

2001 (Entire Year) (493kb Zip file of a 1,1711kb Microsoft Word file).
This file was auto-generated by WebTrends.

Month of December (579kb Zip file of a 1,805kb Microsoft Word file).
This file was auto-generated by WebTrends.

Day of December 31 (540kb Zip file of a 1,820kb Microsoft Word file).
This file was auto-generated by WebTrends.

The first thing to note from the full year report is that over 67% of all page views for FirstNight.org comes in December. All other months average about 3% each. Then, from the December report, you can see that December 31st accounts for nearly 29% of December's traffic. Over 20% of the entire year's traffic in one day.

677 thousand pages were viewed in December of 2001 (compared to the previous year's 505 thousand) and 201 thousand pages delivered on the 31st. There were nearly 15,000 page views in the 11 o'clock (EST) hour (11.14% of the day's total). This level of traffic (4 page views a second not counting the many other virtual servers also hosted on the same hardware) nearly crippled web server. However traffic eased slowly after that an dwindled to nearly nothing by around 10pm.

The browser wars seem to have stabilized somewhat. Internet Explore accounted for 84.73% of visits while Netscape accounted for 13.47% (down a little from last year, but not much). Interestingly 88% of Netscape visitors are still using version 4.x. Nearly 94% of Internet Explorer visitors had upgraded to version 5 or 6.