Some of you will be in the same situation as me and run servers instead of having an account on a web hosting site.

I currently have 2 servers located in a datacenter in America and then a couple of backup servers in my garage that take regular snapshots of my production servers. The also act as backup MX (mail exchanger) and DNS servers so that I can quickly and easily move my hosting should something fail in the datacenter.

It costs me around $200 US$ a month for my servers in America. Recently I was looking at my combined server graphs and noticed that there is a kind of bell curve each day in the graph.

Obviously I need enough capacity on the servers to handle the top of the curve with some room to spare as my sites grow. This means that for a period of time each day, at the bottom of the curve, my servers are running well under capacity.

I got to thinking about this and came to a pretty obvious conclusion, to increase my ROI I need to get more visitors to my sites during the low parts of the curve. If I can flatten out the curve then I should be able to make more income without spending more money increasing my capacity.

Of course, the question is “How?”, I’m still working on that, I have a few ideas and they seem to be working, but it will probably be at least another month before I have proof that it works.