WageIndicator, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe: a Match through the Years

WageIndicator, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe: a Match through the Years

By Huub Bouma, WageIndicator developer since 2001

 

Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe, the company I own and run with my friends Duco Dokter and Wietse Helmantel was founded in 2001. Loonwijzer was one of our first customers and is still with us today, 14 years later. At first the survey and its hosting was the only project we did, shortly followed by the first Salary Checks. In those day we mainly built software in Java.

 In 2004 we also did the WageIndicator websites, just a few still by then. The websites were built in Plone, which is written in the Python programming language. We found out that Python was a lot more fun to program in than Java, so we switched and did nearly all of our new projects in Python ever since. The only java software we work on these days is still … the WageIndicator survey.

 We maintain about 10 servers, physical and virtual, on which we host services for the websites, the surveys, the Salary Checks, Collective Bargaining Agreements, Minimum Wages, Living Wage surveys, data storage, backups and a number of supporting tools.

 The problems and challenges we faced were usually not so easy, yet we nearly always managed to find a solution in close cooperation with the other stakeholders.

 

Statistics Tell Part of the Story

 We've collected some statistics in order to give an idea of what our machines are dealing with.

 Number of surveys that were started (not all completed!):

  •  January 2013: 64,276
  • January 2014: 112,155
  • January 2015: 296,202

 

Our website (Plone) might not be the fastest CMS in the world, but we manage to squeeze out quite a number of hits due to our setup with load balancing and caching. A hit is a resource that is requested from our server, so it could be an image, a Java script file or the html page. These are some statistics for the number of hits on the websites for this year (2015):

  •  
  • Europe: ~ 1.6 million hits per day (average over last 175 days at the time of writing)
  • Americas: ~ 350 K hits per day (average over one of the last days when writing)
  • Asia: ~ 180 K hits per day (average over last 95 days at the time of writing)

 

Tool Popularity

 Next, we feature and maintain a number of popular tools. Here are statistics for the number of hits for these tools in 2015. They are served from separate servers, therefore these statistics must be seen as completely separate from the website statistics above.

  • Salary Check: ~ 2 million per day
  • Cobra (CBA + Minimum Wages): ~ 500 K hits per day
  • Living Wage: 500 K hits per day

So as a grand total we can proudly say that we serve about 5 million hits per day!

 

But let's remember the famous phrase `There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics`.

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