This month’s eight-day holiday of Chanukah was a record-breaking season for the Judaism website Chabad.org.
Alexa, a Web statistics company, ranked the site as one of the top-5,000 Internet domains in the world in terms of the number of visitors.
According to the site’s IT director, Rabbi Moshe Berghoff, internal data offers a closer look at Chabad.org’s performance.
Quashing its own records, the site reached 2.1 million households over the course of the holiday. Those households, in turn, accessed more than 6 million pages.
The page visits spanned the breadth of Chabad.org’s multilingual and multimedia content. All told, visitors watched 158,062 videos on Jewish.TV, the site’s clearinghouse of video offerings, including live classes, animated features, professionally produced programs, audio recordings and event footage. Users also downloaded 32,342 individual Chanukah songs, and printed 39,583 pages of various latke recipes.
Berghoff noted that staff, anticipating a spike in demand, upgraded the site’s infrastructure in advance of the holiday.
“Thank G‑d, growth on this scale made our previous seasonal peaks look small in comparison,” said Berghoff.
Visitors to the site were equally enthused.
“Thank you for this information on Chanukah,” wrote Jody L. of Elmira, Ontario, in Canada. “This will be our first Chanukah and we are very excited to celebrate it.”
“This website is lighting us up not just for eight days, but the whole year,” echoed another site visitor, who identified herself as Odelia from Erlangen, Utah. “Thank you for all the meaning and color you give to Jewish life.”
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