In December of 2008, we hit the venerable Google Analytics 1,000,000 totally unique users a month threshold. In January 2009, we crossed over the 1.1 million marker. February found us hitting the 1.2 million level. Then, in March, the 1.3 million level was passed. And so on and so forth until, today, in September of 2009, we have reached the 1.7 million totally unique users a month marker. (Being that we serve a professional audience, we always drop during the Summer months but bounce back fast in mid-August or so, as vacation season ends and people get back to work.) At our current growth levels, we will hit TWO MILLION totally unique users a month by February 2010 or thereabouts.
We have been doubling every year for the last few years and this current cycle appears that it will be no exception. We will have doubled again, from one million to two million totally unique users a month, in a little over a year.
It's rough to keep up a growth curve like that, year after year. Especially when the technology behind all of this is quite expensive when you hit the level that we have hit -- not to mention that we compete against companies who, for the most part, are international publishing conglomerates that are mostly billion dollar enterprises.
Back when I used to teach business classes to active business owners and managers for a couple of the banks here in Central California -- as well as speaking at California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo's business classes -- one of the things that I pointed out regularly was that uncontrolled growth kills more businesses than under-capitalization. Surprised? Don't be, you can adjust and rescale a business to meet the level of monies available, far easier than most can figure out how to succeed with a business that is demanding more and more resources quickly due to the growth that is driving out of control.
Juggling these kinds of growth levels -- and the demands on both people and the technological backbone that supports it all -- is a real feat in a market wherein the number of available sponsors from which to draw support dwindles with each new acquisition. What used to be 10 companies a decade ago (in some cases), is now a single company.
Building something like Creative COW is a constant juggling act and it's one in which every ounce of both human and technological resources are constantly being drawn on and leveraged to maintain the kind of astronomical growth that we have to support here at The COW.
Sometimes, we have phone conferences and our team discusses the next phase of what we need to do to assure that The COW does not collapse under the weight of its own popularity. It isn't always easy but when you have a team such as we have built over the last decade, the job is doable and we look forward to early 2010 when the COW will in all likelihood be rolling past the 2 million unique users a month marker.
Posted by: Ron Lindeboom on Sep 4, 2009 at 12:33:03 pm
Well, it seems as if we just passed the 900,000 totally unique users a month marker (according to Google Analytics) and here we are, a month later and we are now past the 940,000 marker. Insane. It seems as if we are always buying more servers and adding more backbone infrastructure to the COW. How do we keep up with it all? Our technical director, Abraham Chaffin, is constantly researching new ways and ideas that keep us ahead of the rapid growth of Creative COW. In his latest foraging on the Net, he came across a powerful new technology that is likely to spur a huge leap forward in data serving. It is called 'Fusion-io" and it is one of the most remarkable new technologies that we have found.
Fusion-io is a PCI-e card that goes into your server and jacks up the drive access speeds to phenomenal levels. For sites like the COW, this is a giant leap forward as in the past we have had to keep adding more and more servers and extra bandwidth pipe to keep up with the growth -- this, as even our ultra-fast quad-Opterons with lots of RAM and the fastest drives, could only feed our ever-growing audience to their limits. Even our now-aging Medéa RAID arrays can only go just so fast. But with the new fusion-io cards in our server farm, we can serve up a LOT more data at far faster speeds using our existing server farm. Thanks Fusion-IO team!
This is what the Fusion-io team says about it all:
Designed around a revolutionary silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory, the ioDrive is the world’s most advanced NAND clustering technology with performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity on par with today's hard disks — giving you the power to improve both memory capacity and storage performance by up to one thousand times. The ioDrive dramatically increases performance such that every server can easily contain the I/O performance of the world's fastest enterprise SAN.
Capable of over 120,000 random read/write IOPS
Allows for less than 50 microsecond access latency
Enables terabytes of Virtual Memory with near DRAM speeds
Eliminates service interrupts due to I/O contention
Save or resume virtual machine states in seconds
Today, we (read: Abraham) install the first card into one of our systems and will beging testing it in our server farm. We are really excited and look forward to putting this puppy through its paces.
We will keep you posted on the results.
Oh, and if you think this is all smoke and mirrors, consider this: Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) just joined their Board of Advisors because of his enthusiasm for what these guys are up to.
Posted by: Ron Lindeboom on Oct 18, 2008 at 10:09:56 am
I just listened to COW leader Aharon Rabinowitz's commentary that ran on NPR. In it, he explores how human beings create one of the most insidious forms of computer virus, the "let's forward a warning about a new virus to all our friends and associates" strand.
I had to chuckle at some of the points that Aharon expresses in his four minute commentary in which he uses analogies drawn from sex education classes in school.
But in the end, it's something that I was thinking of forwarding along as a link to all my friends and associates that think they need to email me every time a new virus comes out. If you are one of these friends, here's the link...
When I first saw the iPhone previewed by Steve Jobs during his keynote at last January's Macworld Expo, I had a sneaking suspicion that I had seen that interface before. In fact, I told Tim Wilson, "Man, that interface looks just like the one that is over at the TED conferences..." that I had sent Tim a link to the summer before.
Well, it *is* the TED interface and while Apple gets top nods for knowing a good thing when they see it, and for licensing it quickly enough to likely have it forever associated with them in the public's mind, I have to chuckle a bit. Why? Because I am sure that since the TED Conference is hosted by Adobe, they saw enough in the interface to invite him to be their guest.
That said, that makes it a rather safe assumption to extrapolate that they likely have "TED interface" initiatives already in place at Adobe. If you would like to see the iPhone interface in the loving hands of its developer, Jeff Han, look here.
What you will see is an interface that is likely the leading contender in the fluidity department, easily outdistancing its rivals for the crown in the "Get the Interface Out of the Way of the User" department. It is one honey of an interface.
When I let my mind percolate on the future and things like the TED interface married to applications like Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, Premiere and others, I have to grin ear to ear like an idiot. This is the kind of video phones and flying cars future we were all promised long ago.
Congratulations Jeff Han, you done good, man.
Ron Lindeboom
CreativeCOW.net
Creative COW Magazine
Posted by: Ron Lindeboom on Mar 31, 2007 at 5:15:29 am
