Maybe-good news! The mystery of the non-SSL traffic is solved, and it appears to have been “real” after all. There was a bug on the web host’s end, and it has been squashed.
But, can this much site growth really be real? The increase has been incredible. The number of unique visitors for June was 6,765, more than doubling the 2,342 unique visitors that showed up in May. But the number of unique visitors for July is already 5,177. It’s only taken six days for July to almost be caught up with June. July 3-5 averaged around a thousand uniques each, and the sixth is 800; but the final number usually doesn’t show up till around noon of the following day. So the sixth may have had more.
The growth is too much to be believed, but it’s been a steady trend for months now –
Those numbers only reflect the SSL traffic, non-SSL was larger up until July.
On the other hand, we have this number from Toocheke (a WordPress plugin for comics that this site uses) –
Pg 47 went up on Thursday, so 47’s number reflects five days of views, but sometime on Sunday, around the time the web host bug was fixed, the page count hit a brick wall. Before the brick wall, every time I refreshed the page, 47 was up another hundred views. After the brick wall, hours would pass with no views. 48 is performing the same – averaging less than one view an hour. Is that the site’s actual traffic? Or did the web host fix break Toocheke?
As the saying goes – “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” I’m expecting the rug to be pulled out from under me . If there were a bunch of comments flooding in, I’d believe the traffic increase reflected real interest in the comic. There must be some other reason for it, and it’s going to suck when I find out what it is.