Tech CAguns.net Engineering

[ikeo1]

I really appreciate the work you do for this site, both technical and content/moderation wise.

This site is fast, easy to navigate, and I appreciate that it's perfectly accessible from mobile devices.

Keep up the great work!

Thank you, I'm glad I can offer the site to the community.

To give people a sneak peak, majority of our users are on mobile. On google its ~81%, so we've always tried to optimize for mobile but it still works well on desktop too because we size everything down. So everything is extra fast on desktop connections, +1 speed if you're wired too.



While looking at that, I wanted to set new traffic targets as we continue to increase our presence and hopefully leverage the platform outside of California. We just flipped Snipershide and Tacswap in overall visits, both paid platforms along with armslist. We're still gaining momentum after only being around for barely over a year.

The current challenge is how to reach out to the broader audience and simplify usability. For the time being, we've been working on making the site easier to use. There's still some friction with usability, so until we can iron that out, we won't push ArmoryHQ.com.

The platform and architecture is proving stable, reliable, and performant with fallback methods that work. We do daily backups for fault tolerance and working tidying up automating upgrades and improving internal workflows. Upgrading software & hardware is a lot easier now than it was in the past and just as easy to roll back.





The view here shows that Californians are dedicated to finding out about 2A in CA. It's very interesting because our user base is smaller in terms of registered users, but the number of DAU (Daily Active Users) is high in comparison to the other sites. We're still looking for ways to get this out to more users and might do a design change on the other site to clean up the aesthetics a bit.

We're gradually climbing the ladder in website traffic. Unfortunately, there's a reduction in 3rd party advertisers, but fortunately we have enough to pay for our current usage with costs gradually increasing. If you haven't already, please consider becoming a supporter for added perks and to support the sites growth.

Compared to where we were a year ago, our traffic is multiples higher and continues to grow as more and more people find out about us. It really goes to show the strength of the California market in 2A. A lot of people will trash on Californians for a variety of reasons, but don't be fooled CA has a very active 2A community of newer and older people. There seems to be a rapid rise in new users post pandemic and we're here to support that.

Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Thank you for making CAguns.net what it is today...

 

[Chupacabra]

Very impressive growth ikeo. Thanks again for creating this forum.

 

[ikeo1]

It’s always fun to look back at these statistics and see just how much we’ve grown. Over the past six months, we’ve seen a 300%+ increase across several key metrics. The most recent dip was due to some filtering we applied, so while there’s a visible drop, the overall trend still shows a significant increase in activity.

We’ve now completed the migration, updated all software packages, moved to an enterprise-grade operating system, and further tightened our security. It’s exciting to see total requests hit 50 million, with data usage approaching a terabyte per month.

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CPU & Memory usage is higher now but according to GPT which is helping me analyze the results the new system is more stable and consistent. There were some issues with some errors but I think that's gone down. We have plenty of headroom for the time being and will continue to monitor.

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Some people might wonder why I’ve been working to monetize the site, and here’s the reason why: we’ve seen a 3x increase in traffic and usage, but only a very minimal increase in donors. As a result, I’ve had to lower some things down and may need to increase ad placements around the perimeter of the site.

If you become a donor, the ads will be limited to local advertisers/vendors we want to promote and encourage to participate in this space. Vendors also help support the site, and our goal is to keep everything self-sustaining as the site and community continue to grow.

We also maintain a staging area for testing, which allows us to roll out updates cleanly and with minimal disruption. I hope we can continue growing the site and offering more features. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’ll admit the marketing side of things can be tiring, it’s not my strongest skill. From a technical perspective, this is a great hobby, but it’s becoming pretty costly. Some of the recent upgrades were made to improve stability and efficiency, ultimately helping reduce costs. I also cleaned up and consolidated servers, making it much easier to spin up new instances when needed.

Now that the major upgrades are done, this marks over a year of patiently and consistently building and scaling alongside the community. Going forward, updates should be easier and more streamlined. There’s still work to be done, but it’s far less than in the past year.

Finishing the migration is a huge milestone, and I’m glad to have reached it. It puts the community on solid technical footing for everything ahead.

Just another follow up on the stats to keep tabs on our progress from a growth perspective. In the past 6-7 months we've once again grown our unique visitors up from ~250k to ~675k per month. Our traffic is pretty stable now and you can see the rate of CPU growth over the different systems we are using. We've expanded the system a couple of time since then and continue to make refinements.

You'll notice that we were able to keep the bandwidth transfer down even though we increased the number of users. This was due to the change we made last time to improve compression and caching. Updates are still pretty smooth and we have a good process to continue to scale the system as we grow. We've also made a number of improvements on the backend systems increasing throughput all across the stack and improvements to different configurations based on our traffic patterns. This led to much more predictable metrics. We continually update our software packages and stay up to date on all security fixes.

It's been fun building this system for the community and trying to make it as smooth as possible. When we have updates it usually only a few minutes, except when we get taken down for other reasons.




Thank you to everyone who's patient with us while we continue to build out the services and platform. I know it's sometimes frustrating, but please bear with us while we continue on this journey. The technical challenges are tough but I'm finding they are the easier things to deal with than what we're running into lately. We have to adapt to the landscape. Any help there is truly appreciated. We've stabilized the system and now working on the other areas I'm not as well versed in.

Your patience is appreciated. I'll do my best to make sure we build capable systems to endure any future growth and add features relevant to the community. We work hard trying to keep an eye on things and our new moderators are doing a great job. The site has grown so much it's hard to manage all parts of the systems, I couldn't do it without their help.

 

[Appropriate_Sky_8043]

Just another follow up on the stats to keep tabs on our progress from a growth perspective. In the past 6-7 months we've once again grown our unique visitors up from ~250k to ~675k per month. Our traffic is pretty stable now and you can see the rate of CPU growth over the different systems we are using. We've expanded the system a couple of time since then and continue to make refinements.

You'll notice that we were able to keep the bandwidth transfer down even though we increased the number of users. This was due to the change we made last time to improve compression and caching. Updates are still pretty smooth and we have a good process to continue to scale the system as we grow. We've also made a number of improvements on the backend systems increasing throughput all across the stack and improvements to different configurations based on our traffic patterns. This led to much more predictable metrics. We continually update our software packages and stay up to date on all security fixes.

It's been fun building this system for the community and trying to make it as smooth as possible. When we have updates it usually only a few minutes, except when we get taken down for other reasons.


View attachment 146264View attachment 146265

Thank you to everyone who's patient with us while we continue to build out the services and platform. I know it's sometimes frustrating, but please bear with us while we continue on this journey. The technical challenges are tough but I'm finding they are the easier things to deal with than what we're running into lately. We have to adapt to the landscape. Any help there is truly appreciated. We've stabilized the system and now working on the other areas I'm not as well versed in.

Your patience is appreciated. I'll do my best to make sure we build capable systems to endure any future growth and add features relevant to the community. We work hard trying to keep an eye on things and our new moderators are doing a great job. The site has grown so much it's hard to manage all parts of the systems, I couldn't do it without their help.

Pretty amazing - thanks for sharing the stats and all the background work to keep this site functional for all!

 

[command_liner]

Early on I suggested you switch to zstd. I asked if you had the statistic for the number of HTML transactions that had zstd turned off. Did that ever get reviewed? If so, how often is it turned off?

Also I wonder what your zstd compression was configured to in Cloudflare. How did you decide which level to use, the thread count, and if you re-use a dictionary (thereby getting the benefits of brotli dictionary approach with the speed of zstd). If you can, please spill the beans.

 

[ikeo1]

Early on I suggested you switch to zstd. I asked if you had the statistic for the number of HTML transactions that had zstd turned off. Did that ever get reviewed? If so, how often is it turned off?

Also I wonder what your zstd compression was configured to in Cloudflare. How did you decide which level to use, the thread count, and if you re-use a dictionary (thereby getting the benefits of brotli dictionary approach with the speed of zstd). If you can, please spill the beans.

I added some compression at the nginx layer, other than than I have had to check it too often. Most of the requests don’t reach so we’re mostly ok.

Overall we haven’t had to optimize to that end just yet since it was mostly images that were the problem which we ended up putting in more aggressive compression and edge caching. The setup here is pretty optimized with 90% cache hit rate overall with a very light payload from the main servers. We also have acceleration which helps with latency so there’s a lot of different things going on.

 

[ikeo1]

I thought I'd follow up here to show the growth we've had recently here at CAguns.net. Those of you who've followed along early saw our big growth spurt early on during the original Calguns migration. At that time, we were still fresh and didn't have a lot of content. This time, we have almost 2.5x the number of users from less than 1000 to now just over 3800. In the last 3 weeks we've grown 900 users and a few hundred listings.

Not much has changed on the backend since the first spurt forced us to make change some decisions early on with our hosting provider and our tech stack. Three months later with and a larger influx of people we're managing the much better. There's no performance drop anywhere and all parts of the system are behaving well. The database and webserver are less than 20% utilization at 95% percentile with a mean of 7% utilization over the last 7 days. The database works less than the webservers which is a good thing. We're not even close to pushing the servers and at anytime, we can increase the system specs (CPU/Memory) by rebooting the box. There's no need to migrate.

Over the last 7 days, cache hit rate is 87%+. Given the same number of users from the previous period April-May. The amount of content is more than last time, from 5.7 million requests up to 8.1 million and growing. The amount of data served shows the increase of an extra 50% 153 GB vs 105 GB. How this compares to Calguns, is the gold plan for vbulletin was $60/mo for up to 200GB. Considering we use some other service our current run rate is ~$100/mo not including software licenses. Fortunately, with limited advertising and memberships we're on our way to breaking even and turning a small profit. We currently only have 1 direct 2A sponsor @T3 Pros , which we really appreciate.

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The curve for this level of growth is a lot nicer where once CGN came back online our userbase dropped. The same thing is likely to happen when they come back online again, but this time more people are familiar with our features. We'll continue to do our best to add more content to the site and allowing users to contribute content.

There's a lot of people who say there's still a small amount of users, but I'm optimistic what we offer here is a solid experience at no cost, with a growing community. You can contribute if you want to in several ways, by sharing, asking and answering questions or via donation, all while the service is FREE to use thanks to early supporters. I'd like to thank the CAguns Supporters who allowed us the breathing room to continue to build freely while we build up our content.

As a side note, this is the first time we've nearly hit 1000 active users daily, considering there's 3800+ members that means over 25% of the members are active daily! It's a really strong sign for us that we're doing the right thing. Please keep spreading the word.

From time to time we like to share these metrics.

We do have some upgrades planned in the near future, so be on the look out for those.

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Cheers!

Nearly two years lter and the data is quite interesting.. We see a lot of traffic from different sources and this includes our blocks that are already in place. The number of requests are down but the number of uniques are up. We've done a pretty decent job of managing to keep different things outside the perimeter of the system while allowing people access.

Its been a fun journey navigating the different aspects of running the site. From a technical perspective, I think its doing very well, but marketing hasn't been so good. I continue to struggle in that area but haven't given up and thankfully members are telling members about the site instead of me.




One metric I'm glad to see is women interested in 2A is continuing to grow on the site. This is a bit higher than actual but it's a good reference point for us. We are seeing a general increase and glad to see more people get interested and learn more about what the community is about.



I think the 2A community is expanding from the data that we see and if the numbers are correct, the amount of interest grew significantly when people could barely see anything about the California 2A back in Aug 2024. I take the growth from 60k-900k with a grain of salt, but the number of active users is about 5x daily from then and will likely continue to grow as we do.

When someone new asks questions, you never know who's behind the screen, but we have seen siblings, significant others, wives all shopping for themselves or their partners looking for information on navigating california's complex and ever changing laws.

I'm really glad to see the CAguns community welcome and educate others as we continue to move forward. I'm glad to see more and more people of all ages really help out each generation. We see Boomers, Gen X, Millenials, and the beginnings of Gen Z coming into the fold. Having a proper guidance and community makes all the difference to help continuing to make 2A more relatable and understood by the general public.

Our largest growth segment was with women and 25-34 year olds which I believe is in large part due to our increased efforts in social media and keeping the forum welcoming.

 

[mblat1968]

I talked to my French friend and that what he gave me:
'
Got Similarweb's estimated data for both (June 2026), for reference:

calguns.net — global rank #229,686, category rank #231 (Hunting and Shooting, US), ~144K monthly visits, up 7.17% month-over-month. Bounce rate 41.4%, ~5 pages/visit, ~3:13 avg visit. Audience 91.5% male, mostly US (99.2%), traffic mostly Direct (85.8%) then Organic Search.

caguns.net — global rank #97,595, category rank #72, ~333.8K monthly visits, but down 47.16% month-over-month (so it had a recent traffic spike that's cooling off). Bounce rate 22.5%, ~9.8 pages/visit, ~8:01 avg visit. Audience 85.8% male, also mostly US. Interestingly, caguns.net currently shows more estimated traffic than calguns.net, despite calguns being the older, more established forum — worth noting it lists itself as "a calguns alternative."

A caveat: these are Similarweb's modeled estimates, not verified numbers — for small-to-mid traffic sites like these, the estimates can be noisy (note the wide month-over-month swings). If you run either site and want ground-truth numbers, hooking up Google Analytics (free) would give exact figures.
'

That gave me a pause. Can anybody here confirm if numbers for this site are more or less correct?

 

[ikeo1]

If you run either site and want ground-truth numbers, hooking up Google Analytics (free) would give exact figures.

That gave me a pause. Can anybody here confirm if numbers for this site are more or less correct?

I posted Google Analytics numbers in white. The black is from another system. I can tell you similar web is off because we ended up blocking them. You can see this because the metrics you shared drops 50% May to June.

I review these numbers regularly and should rise back up in July/Aug. I unblocked their crawler specifically because their system was blocked by our aggressive anti-crawler setup.

I won’t hook up my Google analytics to that site because they’ll have access to our data and sell the data or allow your French friend to see our data.

Similarweb is undercounting but the one in black is edge hits and the most accurate number which includes bots etc. This site gets 2.7+ million views / mo from registered and unregistered users and spikes when there’s news

You can tell they under count because they get access denied and not the site. That should change in the future as we come out in the open a bit more now.



I will note, we have lot a lost of traffic since then as gafshub came back online. Otherwise, for CA we're still the largest compliance oriented site. The others have little to no restrictions so it's clear why people would go elsewhere.

 

[mblat1968]

Surprise for me was not that traffic dropped . It was because the data showed that this site is larger than calguns.

I would never guessed. Even if in retrospect it is expected. It is what couple years after being constantly off line will do to anybody. I doubt they will recover soon even considering that they seem to fix some of the issues

 

[ikeo1]

U pause was not that traffic dropped . It was because date showed that this site is larger than calguns.

I would never guessed. Even if in retrospect it is expected that is what couple years after being constantly off line will do to anybody. I doubt they will recover even considering that they seem to fix some of the issues

They serve a particular demographic which is still intact. We've been serving the enthusiast demographic and new comers. We're about 3x now and they still have a dedicated group. It's not just being offline, we also welcome people that typically aren't there. So as a whole, there's something for everyone's flavor of exercising your rights.

They've recently fixed things there so it'll be up to members there to help rebuild membership.

 

[TheRatDragon]

@ikeo1 Quick question ikeo, sorry if it isn't related but did you disable VPNs for members again? I haven't been able to use any NordVPN locations since Monday.

I was going to also say that the fact that we are growing as a community and actually creating more interest in 2A here in California at least is great, the more people who are informed and knowledgeable about firearms and not just scared and easy to manipulate them into hatred for anything 2A is good, it means our conversations on this platform are engaging and thought provoking.

 

[Gawernator]

@ikeo1 Quick question ikeo, sorry if it isn't related but did you disable VPNs for members again? I haven't been able to use any NordVPN locations since Monday.

I was going to also say that the fact that we are growing as a community and actually creating more interest in 2A here in California at least is great, the more people who are informed and knowledgeable about firearms and not just scared and easy to manipulate them into hatred for anything 2A is good, it means our conversations on this platform are engaging and thought provoking.

I was using wifi at a Kaiser hospital and it wouldn't load, so I think yes

 

[ikeo1]

@ikeo1 Quick question ikeo, sorry if it isn't related but did you disable VPNs for members again? I haven't been able to use any NordVPN locations since Monday.

I was going to also say that the fact that we are growing as a community and actually creating more interest in 2A here in California at least is great, the more people who are informed and knowledgeable about firearms and not just scared and easy to manipulate them into hatred for anything 2A is good, it means our conversations on this platform are engaging and thought provoking.

No I didn't disable anything else. Your provider might've switched IP blocks. I take that back, I just looked at the records and I did close off a block of IP's that was attacking the site. Please DM me your ip and I'll confirm.

 

[ikeo1]

I was using wifi at a Kaiser hospital and it wouldn't load, so I think yes

DM me your ip and i'll take a look. Sometimes they block us too. We're large enough now, that it does happen based on our URL. I haven't added too many network blocks..

 

[Gawernator]

DM me your ip and i'll take a look. Sometimes they block us too. We're large enough now, that it does happen based on our URL. I haven't added too many network blocks..

It was last Friday so I’m not sure what my IP was.

 

[ikeo1]

It was last Friday so I’m not sure what my IP was.

Next time you're there, go to whatismyip.com and then DM me. We should be available to to people who need us.

 

[hellofirearm]

from a fellow dev, this is super sick to see! keep up the great work!!