The forum broke a new record tonight

When I logged on tonight, I was getting internal server errors on every other page I clicked on. I looked at the stats and there were 583 people on the site at 9:43 PM. Before today, I think the most people we have ever had on the site at one time was somewhere between 250-280. If the site keeps growing, I'll probably need to upgrade to a dedicated server to handle the traffic.

It seems to me that the number spike was during the Mike Braiotta thread. I would suspect that his name filtered through the search engines, increased the traffic flow, and then faded off into the sunset.

I'm going to check Mike's Facebook and Twitter page...I have a feeling that the "Heart of Gold" post may have been mentioned.

Well, I checked Mike's Facebook & Twitter pages...no mention.

No biggie, Mike I'd rather you plug the forum on an episode of Storage Wars than on Facebook anyway. 

Ahh Man, people found out I'm posting here! My covers been blown! Travis get that new server ASAP, you're going to need it!

It looks like we broke the old record last night by 3 people. 586 people online at the same time and no server problems, imagine that.

And only a handful of post.

I haven't gotten any error messages since the forum crashed so I guess the new hosting is working. (Knock on wood)

I looked at my analytics account today and the forum got about 100K pageviews in February. The site statistics at the bottom of the home page are obviously way off. Apparently there is a fluke in this version of SMF that causes the site to count every profile pic as a page view.