askmarvin.ca began as a web site to help people increase their Broad Band Internet speeds. Originally I was posting on other forums about this and so many people asked for 'hands on' help that I thought it would be easier to put up a web site about it - rather then to keep answering the same questions over & over.

  While the modifications required to increase people's Internet speeds had been around for a while it seemed that most people found my explanations easier to understand & implement. As well, most people didn't want to spend all day trying to get the best speeds - they just wanted a fast and easy way to optimize their connection and get back to doing more important things.

  To that end the site succeeded and many people were grateful. One user who implemented the steps found that he more then doubled his Internet speed. He was so astounded that he tried it on 4 separate computers and got the same results! Because of his remarkable success he then recommended the site to LockerGnome - an on line site with a great deal of loyal readers....

  That morning I got up and discovered - much to my surprise - that a great deal of traffic was on my site. It was more then I'd ever seen in my life. 14,471 people downloaded the registry tweaks alone!

  That inspired me to revamp the site. I chucked the Front Page web and added in a Discussion Forum. Along the way I realized that my pages were very large in physical size so I began trying to streamline the files for faster display and less data transfer.

  Eventually the traffic petered out. In the meantime I added support for more Internet Service Providers. I wanted the site to become less 'Shaw Specific'. During the past year I went back to work managing an automotive garage then spent the summer doing Automotive Air Conditioning - a new business that I started up

  When the weather cools off there's less demand for A/C and I typically return to spending more time here. In the meantime the site's now sustaining a monthly average that is as high as when the site was featured in the article. I'm always keeping an eye on the Forums though - and there are other users there ready to answer questions. The forums are becoming quite vibrant and that's where the action is!

A lot has happened over the past year! In October 2005 the company hosting my site (iPowerWeb.com) decided to arbitrarily shut it off - with no warning. Dues were fully paid for almost another year and a few days earlier I had just entered into a long-term agreement with them to lease a dedicated server! This action, plus site growth and the need for more control, caused me to shift the site over from being hosted by an outside 3rd party company to hosting it myself on my own dedicated servers here at my home.

The site is now running on a dedicated 2U Dell PowerEdge 2650 rackmount server running dual XEON processors with 2 gigs of memory off a 5 disk RAID 5 array. A Compaq DL380 rack mount server was recently added to the fold - along with Microsoft's ISA 2004 firewall and caching technology. You'll be pleased to note that web server single page serve times dropped from an average of 1.4 seconds (similar to Microsoft's serve times) to less then 300 milliseconds. In addition, I now have the ability to host thousands of websites - if I so desire.

In addition an IBM NetFinity 7000 M10 was added with 4 XEON processors and another RAID 5 array to handle email and other miscellaneous tasks. Over the last 7 months the network has been designed, re-fined and re-designed until it has finally reached a level of stability and scalability that will allow it to scale to any volume of users. Bandwidth is able to be added on demand in 1 MegaBit segments and fail-over WAN links from different providers are now possible. Servers can also be added as needed. I'm not anticipating radical growth but I did want to architect a network design that would not need to be revisited again.

Enterprise-scale site analysis software is also being put to use to keep track of people. It's a lot of fun seeing where they come from, where they go to on the site and how long they spend there. Did you know that one city is always the top visitor to the site? It's London England in the United Kingdom. It's been encouraging to see more people visiting from the Middle East and also the Western European countries continue to be frequent visitors.

New things are happening on the Discussion Forums arena and more knowledgeable users are now active there. In addition, I've also enabled people to get their own Personal Forums. Now that the back-end architecture is completed and the site's been re-designed, I think my management duties are over. From now on it looks like it's just going to be a matter of adding content.

Please address all Questions to the Forum