You might have noticed that Userrepository uses Cloudflare. I chose it for two main reasons: their ability to help mitigate (D)DoS attacks and to help hiding the IP address for the VM from script kiddies.

It’s not that I think Userrepository will ever be a target for a (D)DoS attack, but better safe than sorry. Also, I have more than enough automated failed SSH authentication attempts without revealing the IP: 441 blocked _IP_s and counting for one fail2ban ssh rule and 2 for another fail2ban ssh rule. I intend to tighten these rules in the near future.

A third (lesser) reason is their analytics. This allows me to evaluate, from time to time, if the repository is of interest for Arch and Arch-based Linux distribution users.

Although the analytics part is not the best-in-breed, it lets me take a look at the stats for the last 30 days. For example, in this time frame, at the time of writing of this blog post, I had 1486 unique visitors and 17622 total requests to userrepository.eu. I honestly expected around half that number at best.

Most of these unique visitors (and hopefully users), from first to last, come from France, Germany, Italy and USA. My country, Portugal, still hasn’t reached the 500 unique requests.

In terms of bandwidth statistics, the numbers are low: 10.14GB in the last 30 days, with only 878.35kB of cached content. This is expected because I doubt they would cache compressed files, but they’re probably caching the 01-README.txt file with the instructions to add the repository to your /etc/pacman.conf file.

The numbers, I must admit, are not what I wanted but they are more than I expected and that’s a strong motivation to keep the project running, hoping it will help other users.

One last thing: please become a Patron if you want to support userrepository.eu. Even €1 will help cover the monthly expenses, just over €15. If I get enough patrons, I’ll be able to upgrade the virtual machine to one with better specs, which will allow a higher package compression level, shorter build times and maybe even packaged kernels. Thank you!