Site Traffic Stats

FinalFantasyFanatic.com traffic statistics (2001-2002) — 44.75 GB lifetime bandwidth.

MKStats 2.1 analysis of the complete FinalFantasyFanatic.com access log from the site's earliest recorded traffic (February 26, 2001) through its final day (November 20, 2002) — approximately 21 months of operation. The MKStats HTML reports only displayed the most recent 90 days (August 22 – November 20, 2002, totaling 6.56 GB), but the underlying MKStats access-stats database accumulates all-time records: the 44.75 GB lifetime total comes from that full database, not from the 90-day display window. Total lifetime: 567,965 page hits, 44.75 GB transferred across 411 tracked URLs from visitors in 51 countries. Peak month by bandwidth was July 2002 (7.48 GB) — the month FieRcE YeD received a call from Verio while vacationing in Florida that the site had exceeded its bandwidth limit, traced to heavy downloads of a Linkin Park Final Fantasy X fan video. After July 2002, large media assets were migrated to a second domain, finalfantasyfanatic.net, to manage bandwidth costs; traffic on the .com continued but bytes served dropped sharply. When finalfantasyfanatic.net was established, RTV King registered and owned the .net domain while FieRcE YeD retained the .com — making them 50/50 partners in the site as a combined entity. That arrangement has become a running joke between the two ever since: whenever one needs a favor from the other, the 50% ownership stake is likely to be invoked. Peak month by total requests was October 2002 (260,778 total requests). Highest single day: October 1, 2002 (11,026 hits). The forum (ikonboard.cgi) alone accounted for 52,528 hits — nearly 10% of all page hits. Top ISPs by volume: AOL (60,066 hits), Telia (54,824 — the Swedish ISP, consistent with Sweden ranking 9th by country), Charter (28,628). marketscore.com appears in the domain list with 6,364 hits — not real visitors, but MarketScore spyware silently proxying infected users' traffic through its servers. googlebot.com logged 1,146 hits, confirming Google was already actively crawling fan sites in late 2002. The reason for the shutdown was not bandwidth — the .net arrangement had solved that. The real reason was economic: a job FieRcE YeD had been counting on for December 2002 did not come through due to conditions at the time, leaving him without the income to sustain the hosting costs. He told RTV King in a private admin-only forum — which the two of them used as an unofficial back-channel, running an ironic spam thread behind closed doors at a time when spam threads were explicitly banned from the main forums — that he was going to have to shut it down. November 20, 2002 was the last day: FieRcE YeD downloaded the server files and let the Verio account lapse. The data is presented inside Doors 98 as an MKStats-style stats viewer accessible from the FFF Archive folder on the desktop.