At the end of March, I was going through some of the generic stats for my web server. I run about 30 different sites on this server, several of which are simply hosted for some friends (small forums, eBay images, etc.). In the few months since I moved to this new server, I’d noticed a large number of users in my stats, but since I only had stats configured for the entire server, there was no way of knowing what site they were really hitting.
Earlier this month (somewhere around April 4th I think), I finally sat down and setup different config files so that I could easily monitor all the different sites hosted on my server, and track down which ones were getting the most hits (yeah, I did this while I was at work, as one might imagine). A few days later, I checked back and went through the list of stats to see what I’d turned up. Much to my shock and awe, I found that one of my smaller sites was getting an enormous number of visitors every month, hogging virtually all the unique users the server was getting.
Lyrics at Dacnomm started out as a simple index of various song lyrics that I had looked up on the internet (some of which were harder to find than others), and which I stored in one central database so I could easily refer back to them at a later time. Apparently, without me realizing it, Yahoo! had indexed my site, and ranked it as one of the top results for some of the more popular songs of the day (yeah, who would have guessed I’d be the number one result for one of the most common lines of a Jesse McCartney song?).
As I’ve watched the stats for the past week or so, they’ve steadily grown to a number I’d never expected to see on any of my websites. As of 6:20pm EST on today, April 11th, 2005, the Lyrics at Dacnomm site has reached 600 unique users thus far this month (since we started logging around the 4th). You can see a screenshot of the logs here.
I’m really amazed and shocked at the number of people I’ve got hitting that simple site every day. Now I can see why most of the other lyrics websites lag horribly… They’re handling an enormous number of visitors simultaneously. This has encouraged me to continue adding quotes to the database, as I’d gotten a bit slack lately. I’m about to reach the 200 mark, and currently there are 193 songs in the database.
So, if you’re looking for a song lyric, and you happen to do a Yahoo! search for it (Google doesn’t index my sites for some reason), you may very well end up sucking up part of my bandwidth! 
[...] I’ve been watching web server stats like a hawk, mainly for the lyrics site I previously mentioned, but also for my blog itself. I decided to start doing updates on the 15th and 30th of the [...]