New records, again…

It’s amazing, but our Chinese game portals game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com keep on growing. Last month we had a total of 32.7 million unique visitors on the two sites, 4 million more than in July (28.7 million), even though normally July is the best month of the year and we had the Olympics in August (which caused a lot of people to turn to their TV instead of their computer).

Also our daily unique visitors went up again: on game.com.cn we broke through the 1 million barrier in early August, and last weekend we were just a few thousand visitors short of 1.2 million unique visitors per day. This week the schools and universities started again, so during weekdays our traffic goes down a lot, but I expect that weekends will show similar traffic to that during the past weeks.

Because during the Olympics our IDC’s (Internet Data Centers, the places where we have our servers all over China) were off limits to everybody, we could not add more servers and I was afraid our sites might break down, but thanks to some tricks we just managed to handle the traffic. Last week we immediately added some extra capacity and this week we will add some more as well. We are thinking about using a CDN (content delivery network) in the future to avoid these issues, but because the cost for this in China is outrageous (about 3-4 times the price for what we spend ourselves on bandwidth and servers for the same amount of data) the discussion about this is far from over.

I feel lucky that things are going so well at Spil Games Asia, and that my team managed to keep the sites up despite the huge surge in traffic. It’s a nice feeling that business is booming and I look forward to the next couple of months. We have several important new features coming up (that I will not blog about until we launch them, the competition also reads this blog – hi guys!), that will make our sites even more popular and that will also help to grow revenues faster. Exciting times!