April 20th. A magnificent day for history.

• 1534 – Jacques Cartier begins the voyage during which he discovers Canada and Labrador.
  
• 1792 – France declares war against the "King of Hungary and Bohemia", the beginning of French Revolutionary Wars.
  
• 1861 – American Civil War: Robert E. Lee resigns his commission in the United States Army in order to command the forces of the state of Virginia.
  
• 1918 – Manfred von Richthofen, aka The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day.
  
• 1939 – Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
  
• 1946 – The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.
  
• 1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
  
• 1972 – Apollo 16, commanded by John Young, lands on the moon.
  
• 2013 – 231 people create an account on Elder Souls.
  

Brought to you by Stool Brory, Co. Why did all of those people suddenly sign-up?

I guess you do sort of need the context of what was going on leading up to that. Very well...

1. Sometime in the evening of April 19th: Brodo Swaggins discovers someone has uploaded a leaked ESO beta footage video to Youtube. He quickly watches it, downloads it for personal lulz, and then posts a thread about it on ElderSouls.com.
   
2. 10 Minutes Later: YouTube removes the video.
   
3. 10 More Minutes Later: Blake gets on his knees and begs for the video, which he now can't watch. A merciful bro, Brodo Swaggins uploads the video on ElderSouls.com. Coincidentally David had literally just finished the new video library database here. Probably some conspiracy, but moving on...
   
4. 10 Minutes following 10 More Minutes Later: Brodo uploads the video to the new video library so people can watch it onsite.
   
5. David watches the video and then goes to sleep because it is now like 4am or something.
   
6. David awakes at 2 PM, only to discover the video is getting hundreds of hits an hour from random guests, sucking up dozens of gigs of bandwidth in short periods of time. He initially laughs, and then realizes he has shitty shared hosting and this will potentially ruin him. He smacks a "Elder Souls Members Only" restriction on the video, thinking this will stop the onslaught of bandwidth.
   
7. People just create an account and continue watching the video anyway.
   

Do you have any statistical factoids that no one will actually look at?

As a matter of fact, I do. Here's how many hits we were getting on a LIVE scale, meaning how many people were clicking something at any one instant...

Here's a picture of how many hits the video was getting every 60 minutes.

The hour/instant numbers don't make sense because I took the photos at different times. Just bear with me... Anyways...

212 people on the entire site, and 63 on the video. Now, the video was a 20-minute large-ass file totaling something like 150 MB. Let's just assume the worst case scenario: every visitor to the video downloads the entire damn thing. 150 MB is equal to about 0.147 GB. 63 people watching this in a 60-minute period comes out to 9.261 GB hourly.

In 24 hours (one day for the scholars among us), this equates to over 222 GBs a day. This is a problem, mainly because this site generally averages something like 20 GB for an entire month.

Remember that this is from the video ALONE. This doesn't even account for the extra visits to the rest of the site the video was leading to. I decided to restrict the video to stop the burning, so to speak.

This all culminated to result in something magnificent... Two hundred and thirty one acconts. In. One. Day.

And? I'm not impressed.

Do you like charts?

I love charts.

In that case, maybe you'll enjoy this before-and-after graph.

Please explain what I'm looking at in an unnecessary condescending tone.

As you wish. Anyways, as you can see prior to April 20th ElderSouls.com was bringing in an astounding 1 new account per day. This all changed on April 20th, when the internets discovered that we were basically the only site that bothered to upload the leaked footage.

I bet that made us pretty popular.

You have no idea. Here's a snap-shot of the "Members Online" list in the 24 hours following the member-only restriction on the video.

Damn. I bet that came close to some kind of record here.

Sort of. The previous 24-hour record was 45. 318 almost got there.

You don't have to be a dick. I was just trying to make conversation.

Whatever. I don't get paid enough for this.

So just how far into the interwebs did this little Elder Souls explosion go?

Far enough that we got our own 4chan thread, basically. I'm not kidding.

Dear Diary,

Today OP was a pretty cool guy...

For some reason I don't see b-tards being too happy with the whole account restriction thing. After all, it's not like we had hard-core gay furry pornography.

Well, there was this guy...

Lel. Who didn't see that coming?

Shut up! Between him and the following account name registrations...

• ihatethissomuch
  
• dontwanttomakethis
  
• Noneofyurbidness
  

... I took a kick in the feels.

I'm sorry. So I bet this day became the saving grace of Elder Souls, which was bolstered by hundreds of fresh accounts every day into infinity and beyond. Right?

Well, not exactly... Here's the rest of the registration graph in the days following.

On the bright side, we have been fairly constant at about 10 new accounts on the weekdays, and 18 on the weekends, since the fateful explosion. It still beats the 1 we were getting previously.

And you never got shut down for bandwidth over-consumption! All's well that ends well, eh?

Yeah, I guess. I miss having 300+ online at once, though. Those were the days...