Interesting facts about the gfgazette.com website. Did you know:
- The Great Falls Gazette website received a little over 660,000 page views in September.
- Those 660,000 page views came from about 47,000 different people.
- Serving all of those pages is expensive. Our server put out over 112 Gb of data in September, just for pages, downloads are actually from a separate server. This is helped by Cloudflare, which offloads about 70Gb of additional data. That’s about 94,371,840 pages of text, just in September! To put it another way, War and Peace, in text, can be downloaded from the Gutenberg project. It is 3.2 megabytes of just plain text. You could download it 57,600 times. That’s 6 Gigabytes of data every day!
- Our mail server likewise does a LOT, it processes over 20,000 emails per month going in both directions
- Our website only takes up about 6.6 Gigabytes on the main server—that is just the website. We use a dedicated server to ensure the best hosting we can get. The website is backed up to an off-site system daily, and data in our database is backed up every hour. A secondary system is currently being rebuilt that holds our digital files. By moving our digital files to a second server it reduces loads on the main server, making the site faster.
- We spend about 5 hours a week updating the site, making improvements, and doing maintenance. The software that runs the site helps reduce the time we need to spend on it. On our original site, Andy would spend 20- 30 hours per week keeping it going! A completely static site just would not be possible with the rate we add articles to the site.
- On average, we add about 40-45 articles a week, which has increased since we started. We have gone from 8 pages to as many as 60(total for the week!) At this point, we’re working to expand our print capacity to add more pages each day!
- We have over 2,200 readers and have just added rural routes back (with next day delivery).
- Our core team puts in close to 300 hours of work a week to make this all happen. We currently only contract out 3 driving positions and 1 production assistant position.
- Our readers send feedback in. Believe it or not, we love ALL of the feedback, the fact that a person took the time to write or email, or call, means everything to us. Some times it’s critical, some times its a simple thank you, all of it helps make the Gazette a great little paper. We’re proving that by being open to working with the community, a newspaper CAN grow.
Author: Andy Anderson
Andy is publisher of Foxys Publishing Co, as well as pressman, ad sales, distribution and sometime janitor. He occasionally makes a wild attempt at writing but quite often is seen running around our offices trying to "Get 39 million things done today..."
