DrudgeReport.com Sends MASSIVE Traffic to WeatherMatrix

May 23, 2002 -- DrudgeReport.com, which gets over 3.5 million hits per day, is a clearinghouse for the latest news, often scandalous or severe. On Thursday, May 23 at 4pm Mr. Drudge put in a link to a WeatherMatrix StormReport about the possible forming Tropical Storm in the Caribbean (see here for a copy of the DrudgeReport when he ran the link to our site -- Tropical Disturbance Forms in Caribbean). Traffic and applications immediately spiked to astronomical levels, even overnight, for 2 days.

In the two days that the story was running, we received 270 Membership Applications. Our normal incoming applications would be 5 to 10 during that period so that was an increase of about 3900%.

On Thursday, when the story broke, we recorded over 50,000 page views on WeatherMatrix.Net during the evening. Our normal for that time period would be around 3000 page views, for an increase of about 650%. The total traffic for the 2 days was approximately 120,000 page views, 1,110,000 hits and 5,022,831,483 bytes of data served. Another way of looking at it is that it we received 1/3 of our normal monthly traffic in 2 days.

If you look at the graphs below you can see how dramatically our traffic changed from its normal background levels of 5/19 to 5/22.

Historically Drudge has been responsible for bringing web servers, especially small ones, to their knees within minutes of his linking them. Because we have a "burstable" bandwidth contract with Pair.com, and because we caught the link and quickly responded by reducing page sizes and moving images to the backup server, our site served the traffic without breaking a sweat. Fortunately the stormreport that he linked to was a small-bandwidth page, although we increased it slightly to promote our site better to incoming users. We moved a number of our high-hit graphics to our backup server, cybervox.org.

Daily Page Views

Hourly Page Views

Membership Applications