You may have noticed the server outage of the main site earlier this week (on Thursday). The server administrator had to take the whole domain down, because there was a huge load coming from that site. Each time Apache was restarted, it was instantly fed up with requests that couldn't be satisfied quickly enough.
We now think we have found out what caused this high load: the ad agency software we are using to manage and track advertising on 3 sites had collected more than 4.8 million records of impressions for statistical purposes. Obviously the MySQL server got slower and slower, because all those entries or the queries are not optimized. In the end the MySQL server was overloaded and not able to respond anymore. Currently the ad agency software is not used, we have created a new website to manage advertising: JAdCenter.com. The Software running there (from Pakistan!) will soon be replaced by another fresh software, because no money can be transferred due to a bug (and all the important PHP files are encoded, *sigh*).
I just want to offer you an alternative for Google Adwords, do you think it's worth it?