Last blog entry: May 2010 — that feels like a long time ago. OzBargain, currently one of the top Australian online communities for shoppers and bargain hunters, started from this humble blog almost 5 years ago, after I’ve been blogging on and off the bargains I found. While the community at OzBargain continues to grow, this blog certainly feels like being neglected. There were many reasons I think, but personal busyness would rank right up there.

I’ve been thinking about “rebooting” this blog for a while, but no, it won’t be the “Bargain Blog” that it used to be. There are way better bargain hunters than I am over there at OzBargain so I won’t embarrass myself posting the crappy deals I found. Instead, this blog would just be about OzBargain — development of it, running it, issues I’ve encountered, occasional amusement, etc. Or maybe a bit more — who knows.

But hopefully I can keep it up. Let’s start with some updates first.

Doing it Full Time

5 years ago I was working full-time as a software architect in a financial software company, and has created OzBargain as a hobby. After burning way too much midnight oil I have finally decided that enough is enough…

In March this year I took my long service leave (yeah, 10 YEARS!!!) and decided that maybe I should spend more time on this website and my family. So I quitted, and have been working on OzBargain as my “job” for the last 6 months. Been rolling out a few new features (and lots more in planning!) and enjoying being at home when kids came back from school.

At the same time “working pass the wee hours” still seems to be the norm. It’s actually quite a lot of work keeping the site running especially when you need to deal the “support” side of things. Hopefully I will have a chance to share that in later posts.

Server Migration

Since hosting of OzBargain migrated from US to Australia last October, it has been plagued with issues. Crucial Paradigm‘s hardware is rock solid, however there has been numerous of kernel panics over the last 11 months. Whole server just hung, and worse, there wasn’t any way to reboot the server remotely so the turn around time to get the site back online ended up being 30 minutes to an hour, as I needed to lodge a support ticket to get the server rebooted.

That was frustrating, and OzBargain members think so too.

So earlier this month I migrated OzBargain away from Crucial Paradigm’s old “legacy” VPS platform into their new Cloud Linux VPS. It has a proper control panel so I can reboot the system remotely (if anything goes wrong). Moreover it is now running Debian 6 “Squeeze” rather than Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which I always suspected that was problematic. It has been smooth sailing for 2 weeks now and so far so good.

Here’s the server spec for running OzBargain:

• 4GB memory
• 50GB SAN storage
• 4x vCPU core (Intel Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz)
• Debian 6 64bit

Also a big thanks to Aaron Weller @ Crucial Paradigm for touring me around their cage in the new Equinix SY3 facility and checking out some of pretty cool hardware they’ve got in the data centre there. Give them a try if you are looking for top notch VPS hosting for your Internet business, and tell them that OzBargain sends you :)

On the other hand, this blog is now hosted on a cheap VPS I found at AlienVPS in Las Vegas for USD$19/year. Now that’s a bargain :)

Interesting Stats

Maybe I shall end this “resuscitation blog post” with some interesting statistics from August. These are collected from Google Analytics.

• 10,016,990 page views in August 2011, from 3,430,414 visits, from 753,574 unique visitors.

• Top 5 web browsers are:

  1. Firefox (32.19%)
  2. Chome (24.11%)
  3. Internet Explorer (22.17%)
  4. Safari (15.34%) — Mac (6.40%), iPhone (5.59%), iPad (2.48%) and iPad (0.38%)
  5. Android Browser (2.67%)

  Which is actually not that surprising. OzBargain has always been heavily biased towards the tech sector hence higher Firefox/Chrome visitors comparing to IE visitors.

• 12.48% of visits are from mobile devices (and OzBargain now has a mobile-optimised site currently in progress). Top 5 are:

  1. iPhone (49.56%)
  2. Android (24.14%)
  3. iPad (21.49%)
  4. iPod (3.24%)
  5. Symbian (1%)

  As much as I love my Android phone, iOS still rules in Australia. Symbian-based phones (mainly Nokia I guess) are just, hmm, pathetic.

• 16,748 visitors from Google found OzBagrain by putting in the full URL into the search box, i.e. this.

Good night!