

Business plan: how to model visitors per hour from multiple geographies - MWarneford
http://dubitplatform.com/blog/2009/8/15/your-business-plan-needs-hosting-costs-start-by-modeling-you.html

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MWarneford
I know its 'crude' to post ones own article, but I'm hoping the community can
highlight flaws and improve the spreadsheet in the post.

I'm working to build a template open source virtual world (or freemium)
business model. I feel there are too few resources - I'd like to make it
easier for entrepreneurs. This is the smartest community I know. So I figured
a great place to get the needed feedback!

BTW - my first post, but been reading the site for years, way way before TC
first posted [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-
new...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-
first-read-every-morning/)

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jacquesm
I can give you temporary access to the analytics stats of two major websites
if you want, drop me a line.

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MWarneford
That would be fascinating, thanks.

Screen shots of daily traffic from different geographies would be amazing. I'm
interested to know if the traffic flow is normally distributed for a given
geography - or if there is a better approximation.

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jacquesm
I think it very much depends on what it is that your website is doing, and how
well it has been internationalized.

The really interesting thing imo is to track such data over time, to see if a
site is trending towards one geography or another.

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MWarneford
Agreed. I would also argue that the audience will significantly effect the
'width' of the distribution.

For example, lets imagine we're building a model that will be used to predict
the hosting costs for a website for tweens. I think it would be fair to assume
that most tweens will be in bed by 9PM, and can only start accessing your site
after school from 4PM. Note im in the UK, school finishes around 4ish...

Given that limited visiting window, we might assume that the normal
distribution would have a mean around 6:30PM and a standard deviation of
around 2, to 2.5 hours.

In this way 68% of our traffic would occur in the 4PM while 9PM - or within
one standard deviation from the mean.

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jacquesm
I sent you a mail back regarding this, you'll need a google account if you
want access (that's how analytics works), if you don't want to set one up I
can send you screenshots, but the google account would be the easier way.

