GoTryTHIS 2 Pre-Launch News

Secrets of GoTryTHIS power-users

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Would you like to know how other users make the most of GoTryTHIS?

Well, I do. So:

I’m planning to publish a 100% free e-book, as in no opt-in required. It will share all the creative ways you, and others like you, use GoTryTHIS, telling us all exactly how you do it. The more of you who participate, the more we will all learn and the better you will be able to profit because of it. Think case-studies, rather than testimonials.

Additionally, all content and ideas that you send, which are used, will be attributed to you in the book, along side the content. This will include an active, direct link to your site if you wish. In many cases, I’ll be quoting your e-mails directly so people can get a taste of your expertise. Please write with that in mind.

Notes: 1) I will exclude anything involving embedded links. 2) By submitting your content, you grant us the right to use it as we feel fit. 3) Submitting content does not guarantee it will be published.

Please e-mail your GoTryTHIS wizardry, techniques, success stories, case-studies, and detailed testimonials to ebook@gotrythis.com. Also, please leave a comment below to let us know you have and to encourage others to do so too!

Thank you,
John

Stress-testing results are in!

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Through stress-testing, we had the following questions to be answered about the new version of GoTryTHIS:

  1. How much cpu usage, storage, and bandwidth is used on the dashboard under very high load?
  2. How many historical clicks can the dashboard handle and still be snappy?
  3. What is the greatest sustainable rate of clicks per minute that any single site can push to the dashboard before there is a backlog, and where does that backlog happen?
  4. Do the clicks that we send match the clicks that get reported? How accurate is GoTryTHIS?

To test this, we setup multiple cloud-based ’servers’, one for the dashboard where all the data ends up, and five test sites. On each test site there were multiple scripts to continually “click” on random test links. These were the links I was giving out at the end when we did two really big tests, with 120 people running these scripts running for 24 hours, simulating months of activity.

Here are the results. Please keep in mind that everyone will have different results based on the servers that their site is on.

CPU Usage:
If you’re doing millions of clicks a day, talk to us first. You’ll need a dedicated server or you can use our new hosted version and we’ll handle things for you.

Bandwidth:
For every 10,000 clicks there will be an extra 4MB of outgoing bandwidth from your site to the dashboard and 1MB of incoming bandwidth to your site from the dashboard.

Storage:
Every 10,000 clicks represent 0.016GB of storage, or 16MB, on the dashboard. Clicks are only stored temporarily on individual sites.

Snappy:
We simulated sending one dashboard 1,500,000 clicks per month for three months from three sites. This totaled in the dashboard having 4,500,000 clicks. I’m very happy to report that it ran as fast as a new installation.

Backlog:
Currently the dashboard can handle a sustained rate of about 2 million clicks per day from all the sites combined before a backlog starts to be created on the sites. As soon as there is a dip in traffic, the backlog reduces until it catches up. We will work to improve these numbers even further after the launch.

Accuracy:
We compared what was supposed to be sent to what actually arrived and found that 20-30 clicks out of 4,500,000 clicks didn’t get recorded. That is only 0.0000067% missed clicks, under very high load. Considering all the ways a click can missed being recorded, this is extremely accurate.

Conclusion:
The new version is exceeding our expectations for performance! :-)

Thanks to everyone who helped with our stress testing!

FILLED: Please help stress test

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Update: Monday December 8th, 3:49PM EST

Please now ignore my previous e-mail looking for people to help test. Enough people have already responded. Thank you everyone!

Soon, we’ll let you know all the results of the tests. Until then I can tell you this: In version 1, we had some users who had problems due to having more clicks than the database can handle. Due to a lot of optimizing and testing, the new version appears to be able to handle a sustained rate of over a million clicks per day, and still load and run very fast!

I suspect we’ll eventually improve on even that. :-)

Thank you,
John.

How many GTT clicks per month do you average?

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Hi.

As we’re testing GoTryTHIS 2 and working out how much resources it consumes, I thought it might be a really good idea to find out what typical and extreme usage is, and what percentage of users fit into each.

Please respond to this blog post and tell me on average how many clicks per month you get on all your GoTryTHIS links combined. Also, what was your largest spike ever? Guestimates are quite alright! :-)

Thank you,
John.

Help stress-test GoTryTHIS2

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

UPDATE:

Please hold off on any more additional testers, and shut down existing tests while we analyze the data collected so far. While it is loading fast, we’re hitting a bottleneck somewhere with the data getting to the new dashboard as fast as we would like. There are stupid number of clicks coming in right now, and I’d like to give it a chance to catch up.

(I’m not sure yet at what point the bottleneck started until we’ve done some serious analysis, but we currently have over 65,000 clicks coming in per minute, so I suspect that under more normal use things will be fine. We’ll try to calculate what that limit is from the data we have now.)

Thank you!

Testing Version 2

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Well, it’s been a long haul.

GoTryTHIS 2 appears to be an upgrade to GoTryTHIS, and of course it is. It is also a testing platform for hundreds of thousands of dollars in other new technology we’ve developed, which means it is really big, complex, and hard to test.

These technologies include a lot of code to make installing and upgrading GoTryTHIS relatively easy, despite all the hard stuff going on in the background. There is also technology around moving data around so you can have GoTryTHIS 2 installed on several sites at once, and manage them from one central location of your choosing.

Imagine all the different types of servers out there, and you may have an idea of the challenges we have had making it all work. But, it’s fun to push the limits of the web!

Here’s the schedule for what is going to happen next:

Crowd-sourced Testing:
Next week, we’re taking the “final” version of GoTryTHIS 2 and putting it out for a mass test through a service called uTest.com. It uses crowd-sourcing to test web applications using many professional software testers.

We’ve got a testing plan put together that involves installing version 1, adding thousands of fake links and millions of fake clicks, upgrading to version 2 and importing those clicks, testing version 2, and then upgrading to a fake version 2.1 to test the new upgrading procedure.

The beauty of the utest service, is that we’ll have the results of that testing in a few days, with feedback from dozens of testers. If we were doing it internally, it would take a month or more and only contain feedback from a few people.

Fixing any problems found
Once that is done, I suspect we’ll have a number of small bugs to fix due to different platform issues. I doubt that we’ll have any major show-stopper bugs at this point that require rethinking anything. (That has happened a few times before, and we’ve designed ways around the problems, so what are the chances of something new coming up this late in the game, right?)

Crowd-sourced testing again
Then we’ll take the updated release and run it through another set of tests at utest to make sure that the final release version is stable. We may have to repeat this process a few times, each time with fewer issues cropping up as they are found and fixed.

User Beta testing
Once this is done, we’ll let in a limited number of real users for beta testing. To give us some cash flow, we’ll also sell some copies of GoTryTHIS 2 at a fixed price.

Recurring Billing Setup
In the background we’ll be finishing off adding recurring billing and new licenses to our billing system to allow for sales of version 2, and upgrading. All sales will be billed at a low monthly fee once we release.

Release
And then at some point, we’ll actually release version 2 for free to all existing users and it will be available for purchase to new customers. I won’t even pretend to estimate when that will happen, but we are making progress!

Version 2.1
As soon as coding is frozen on version 2, and the billing system is ready, we’re starting to add new features to GoTryTHIS 2.1. All the hard stuff will be done for the infrastructure of the program, and new features can be added frequently. Everyone who is paying monthly fees will automatically get new releases with new features, as requested by users. Existing users will get a discount on the monthly membership, if they choose to continue to receive updates.

Thank you,
John.

GoTryTHIS and WordPress do work together!

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

For those of you who have Wordpress, Joomla or other systems that use mod_redirect in your home folder, it has been said that GoTryTHIS doesn’t work.

There are various work-around’s listed here.

As well, there is a simple fix for Wordpress. Similar fixes might work for other systems as well.

WORDPRESS FIX:

In your templates folder for Wordpress, there is a file called 404.php that displays when a page isn’t found.

We’re going to replace that file with one that redirects to GoTryTHIS.

Copy the code below, and then load up the admin side of your Wordpress blog and go to “Presentation” and then the “Theme Editor” sub-menu. Then select 404 Template on the right hand side.

First, copy all the text there from 404.php into a text file on your desktop and save that as a backup in case something goes wrong.

Then replace all the content of 404.php in Wordpress with the following code, and edit the variable $gtt_path with the correct domain name and path to where you installed GoTryTHIS on that web site.

Then save the file, and test your blog and test a GoTryTHIS link.


<?php
// Set the following line ($gtt_path) to the location you installed GoTryTHIS into
$gtt_path = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/gotrythis';

// Optionally add this for search engines
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");

// Do not edit past this point
header( 'Location: ' . $gtt_path . '/gotrythis.php?id=' . urlencode( substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],1) ) );
exit();
?>

Announcing GoTryTHIS 1.4

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Tomorrow we’ll release an update to version 1 for those who want it. This is not a critical upgrade, so if you don’t need this feature, you might just want to wait for version 2 before upgrading again.

The new feature, by very popular request, makes it so that variables are passed to cloaked links, which is rather useful if you’re using products like xconversions.com or covertconversionpro.com.

For example, in the previous version if I cloaked this link, you would end up on Google’s home page, where with version 1.4 (and 2.0) you will end up on the correct link.

http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-35,GGLG:en&q=gotrythis

We are also adding the same feature to the encrypted javascript links.

John.

Version 1 Sales Finished

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Hi.

Yesterday the last remaining copies from our Black-Hat sale were sold and we are starting to stress test version 2 and will be testing on on live accounts next week.

There were some refunds due to a missing feature, which was in version 2 but not in version 1. We’ve now added that feature into an update to version 1 and we’ll see if they want to get their copy back. If not, we may release those copies again to new customers.

Thank you everyone!
John.

The Black-Book DVD’s

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

We recently arranged with Mr. X. to sell his Black-Book DVD’s for half price, getting all the remaining 87 DVD sets from him. People paid $2,400 to attend the workshop and he was selling the DVD’s up until last week for $1,197.

We’re selling them at $597 and we’re paying the shipping. These are 13 DVD’s of the best content on PPC domination you’ll find anywhere.

You can find out more and get your copy here, until we run out of copies:

–> http://www.gotrythis.com/bbDVD.php