Well the last 4 days have been very slow. Lost about 2500 unique visitors the last 4 days thats an average of over 625 unique visitors. Anyone having similar traffic problems. Any ideas why this is happening?

I have been experiencing the same with my Yahoo and MSN
traffic but at least I moved couple of spots up on Google. I will probably compensate the traffic loss by getting some Overture ads going...

Are you referring to valiantmarketer.com?

I haven't heard of any outages of the widespread kind which might account for it.

The first thing I do when I see trouble like this is check my stats to make sure my normal links in are still producing. Next, I check a site like Internet Traffic Report to see if any of the major carriers dropped the ball and made it hard to get around. For example:

North America

Shows internet traffic across the US and CA. At the bottom of the page, we see some graphs:



You see that around 7:15PM yesterday, there was a major disruption, and an across the board reduction in the amount of traffic. The cause for it is shown in the next two graphs:



You can see a pretty bumpy graph here, and the higher that one goes, the worse off things are. In simple terms, the reponse time, or latency, is how long it takes between sending a message across the internet and getting a response back, e.g. requesting a web site and having it actually start downloading.

Now you can see that the response time spikes at the same point as the traffic reduction in the first graph. Of course, it has been high in the past without a traffic loss. Why is this different?

The worst offender is the third graph:



Here you see a spike in packet loss in concert with the same time on the other two graphs. This is our big problem, and the cause of the traffic drop. All information on the internet is bundled into data packets and passed back and forth between a server and its client. Unfortunately, an overloaded router or bad connection can make these disappear. In that case, not only does the other end of the connection have to wait a certain amount of time to make sure it isn't going to arrive, it has to re-request it and wait for it again. This translates into a a very slow download.

Since we all know how patient internet users are, most of them probably logged off and went to watch tv at this point.

Which all comes back to the point all marketers know. A slow site won't sell much of anything, unless you're the only game in town.

There's a good free speed check on http://www.alertra.com/. Just put your URL into the Spot Check box at the top right of the page.

Hope this rambling is helpful to someone. :)

Hey RS Mike, thanks thats interesting information on Pocket loss. Actually I was referring to a different site. Thanks Marifer for the information, it does seem like Microsoft and yahoo are the ones that I'm seeing the problem with.