Blog | myDiveOnline.com - the best dive operator directory for South-East Asia

Newsletter September

2009-09-02T14:09:00.001+02:00

Record month for myDiveOnline.com!

Our user base continues to increase, and so does the number of reviews and ratings – this is great! But! We’re still eager to hear back from all of you how we can continue to make myDiveOnline.com even better! Just send us an email to info@mydiveonline.com with any comments, suggestions, questions or criticisms!

So, who has been getting all the attention at myDiveOnline.com?

Who gets most traffic on myDiveOnline.com?

myDiveOnline.com tracks which dive destinations and dive operators are popular among our visitors. Over the past 60 days the top five have been:

Top Visited Dive Destinations

Top Visited Dive Operators

Puerto Galera

Most visitors to Puerto Galera are attracted by the excellent scuba diving provided by the protected marine sanctuary. There are a number of dive shops in the area that provide access to a macro (i.e. small life) heaven.

Mermaid Dive Resort

GREAT DEALS AVAILABLE!!! Welcome to Paradise Mermaid Resort is located in the peaceful Scuba Diving Paradise of Puerto Galera on the tropical Island of Mindoro, Philippines!Mermaid Resort offers 30 spacious guest rooms and suites

Tioman Island (Pulau Tioman)

Scuba facilities are readily available, and the diving is reasonably good, especially in view of the proximity to Singapore. Popular dive sites are: Paya: A group of rocks adjacent from the beach offers a variety of colourful coral and fish.

Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket, Thailand

Scuba Cat Diving, PADI 5 * CDC Center, Phuket, Thailand Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket, Thailand, a British owned Dive Center, is a 5 Star PADI CDC Center and has been a 5 Star PADI IDC center for more than a decade.

Singapore

Not a traditional dive destination, Singapore none-the-less has a number of dive operators that provide regular tours to the more traditional dive sites in Malaysia, Thailand, Borneo, Vietnam & Indonesia.Changi Airport provides easy connections to the rest of Asia.

Sibu Island Cabanas PADI Dive Centre

We are the only PADI Resort Dive Centre on Pulau Sibu Malaysia. The PADI DiveCentre offers Fun dives and training for any level of diving,starting from Discover Scuba Diving through to dive master.

Kota Kinabalu

The capital of Sabah, Kota Kinabalu is the starting point for dive trips to the Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine Park.Coral beds and marine flora is abundant here and various dive spots can be found along all the designated dive sites in the Park.

B&J Diving Centre Sdn. Bhd

B&J DivingCentre, welcomes you to discover Tioman Island, one of the primedive destinations of Peninsular Malaysia.

Vietnam

Vietnam is growing as a tourist destination, but is still years behind the over-commercialisation of places like Thailand. Nha Trang is the diving capital of Vietnam and is probably the busiest and most developed seaside city.

Sipadan Scuba

Sipadan Scuba is Borneo's first and only ‘PADI 5-star IDC Training Centre and National Geographic Dive Center’, the highest ratings obtainable for dive centers.

July Newsletter

2009-07-30T12:54:00.000+02:00

Record month for myDiveOnline.com!

July has been a record period for myDiveOnline.com. Our user base has increased by 25%, which is great! Traffic continues to grow as more and more people discover us.

But! We’re still eager to hear back from all of you how we can continue to make myDiveOnline.com even better! Just send us an email to info@mydiveonline.com with any comments, suggestions, questions or criticisms!

So, over this past month or two, who has been getting all the attention at myDiveOnline.com?

Who gets most traffic on myDiveOnline.com?

myDiveOnline.com tracks which dive destinations and dive operators are popular among our visitors. Over the past 60 days the top five have been:

Top Visited Dive Destinations

Top Visited Dive Operators

Puerto Galera

Mermaid Dive Resort

Tioman Island (Pulau Tioman)

Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket, Thailand

Singapore

Sipadan Scuba

Sipadan Scuba is Borneo's first and only ‘PADI 5-star IDC Training Centre and National Geographic Dive Center’, the highest ratings obtainable for dive centers.

Kota Kinabalu

Reefers Dive Resort

Reefers Dive Resort is Koh Phangan's first fully inclusive PADI Dive Resort. Reefers Dive Resort is located on the beautiful beach of Haad Yao, Koh Phangan, Thailand offering superb diving holidays.

Indonesia

Indonesia has an archipelago of more than 17 000 islands, stretching 5000 km from east to west - a distance equivalent to the width of the US. This provides bountiful opportunities for diving, and indeed - Indonesia is full of interesting dive sites.

Lautan Mas

Outages

The internal problems at our hosting provider continued through the end of June and beginning of July. They have not reoccurred for a while now, so fingers crossed, they seem to be fixed. Once again, apologies for the inconvencience!

Outages, outages, outages

2009-07-15T11:41:00.002+02:00

The past couple of weeks saw major problems with myDiveOnline.com's infrastructure coincide with my holidays. As a result, detecting and resolving outages took much longer than it should have.

The support team now tells me that they've found the root cause of the outages that have been recurring over the past month or so. Fingers crossed.

Server up

2009-06-23T14:42:00.001+02:00

The site is now up and running again. On the surface, the outage seems to have been cause by the same problem as last week's outage. We're looking into how we can avoid it occuring again in the future.

Server up

2009-06-18T09:26:00.000+02:00

The server is finally back up again. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Server down

2009-06-17T08:45:00.002+02:00

We're having some problems with our server. Technical support has been alerted.

Update: The problems are apparently worse than just the website being down. Everything to do with mydiveonline.com is down due to some problems with the internet infrastructure.

myDiveOnline.com Newsletter

2009-06-15T13:45:00.001+02:00

Who gets most traffic from myDiveOnline.com?

myDiveOnline.com tracks which sites we send visitors to. For the past month, the top five has been:

Top Visited Dive Destinations

Top Visited Dive Operators

Indonesia

Sipadan Scuba

Sipadan Scuba is Borneo's first and only ‘PADI 5-star IDC Training Centre and National Geographic Dive Center’, the highest ratings obtainable for dive centers.

Malaysia

Malaysia is divided into two main areas. Peninsular Malaysia is linked to Thailand in the north and, via a causeway, to Singapore in the south. Further to the east, on the island of Borneo, are the two states of Sabah and Sarawak.

Blue Waters Borneo

Established since 1995, our company specializes in scuba diving trips within the islands of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Borneo, and at exploring new dive sites at Pulau Mengalum and Pulau Tiga.

Philippines

The Philippines is one of the best diving destinations in the world. Regardless of your taste, there is something for everyone - walls, reefs, drop-offs, lagoons, submerged islands, wrecks, and an abundant sea life.

Barracuda Diving Resort

Bali & The Lesser Sunda Islands

The Lesser Sunda Islands is the area containing the island paradises of Bali, Flores, Lombok and Jimbaran.

Sea Pearl Dive Center

SEA PEARL DIVE CENTER is a one stop, full facilities center

Luzon

Luzon is the northernmost island group, center of government, history and economy and home to the capital.

Lautan Mas

Weekend outage

2009-06-15T13:43:00.001+02:00

Our hosting provider had some problems over the weekend, which resulted in some downtime for myDiveOnline.com.

Most Popular Right Now, Advertising on myDiveOnline.com and more...

2009-06-01T18:35:00.000+02:00

Most Popular on myDiveOnline.com – Right Now!

myDiveOnline.com has a “Most Popular Right Now” function which shows who’s getting the most visitors right now. Here’s the current top 3:

Top Visited Dive Destinations

Top Visited Dive Operators

Puerto Galera

Mermaid Resort

Khao Lak

Khao Lak Scuba Adventures is the most popular diving center in town. Our Manta Queen fleet operates 4 day and 4 night trips to the Similan Islands, Koh Bon, Koh Tachai and Richelieu Rock, 14 dive's on Thailand's premier dive destinations.

B&J Diving Centre Sdn. Bhd - Salang Bay

One of the oldest and most respected diving centers in Malaysia is B&J Diving Centre.Established in 1987, B&J operates today 2 dive centers on Tioman Island and 1 dive shop in Johor Bahru.

Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur, or KL, is the capital of Malaysia. With the world's cheapest five-star hotels, great shopping and even better food, increasing numbers of travellers are discovering this little gem of a city.

Sipadan Scuba

Sipadan Scuba is Borneo's first and only ‘PADI 5-star IDC Training Centre and National Geographic Dive Center’, the highest ratings obtainable for dive centers.

Advertising on myDiveOnline.com

Last week we switched to the Google Adsense network. All of you using Google Adwords for online advertising should now be able to target ads for myDiveOnline.com. We’re working on a how-to document and will post it when finished.

Problems copying and pasting text

Some of you have noticed that there’s a bug when copying and pasting text from Microsoft Word. We’re looking into what we can do, but for now the work around is to:

1. Copy text from Microsoft Word
2. Paste the text into Notepad
3. Copy the text from Notepad
4. Past the text into the myDiveOnline.com editing tool

Unfortunately this means you’ll have to re-do some of the formatting, but it’s the best we can do for now.

Advertising Networks - The Power of Google

2009-05-30T20:33:00.004+02:00

You might have noticed that we've switched advertising network. As of yesterday, Google AdSense is powering all the ads on myDiveOnline.com. So far the results are promising in terms of generating revenue.

It will be interesting to see if Google will continue to generate stronger revenues over the longer term.

myDiveOnline.com on Twitter and Facebook

2009-05-11T20:57:00.000+02:00

Did you know that all updates from myDiveOnline.com and blog.mydiveonline.com are now published via Twitter and Facebook? To start receiving updates via Twitter, simply follow us via http://twitter.com/mydiveonline. On Facebook you can become a Fan at http://www.facebook.com/pages/myDiveOnlinecom/75534753966.

If you prefer to get updates about new dive shops, ratings, etc, via RSS you can subscribe to feed via http://mydiveonline.com/newsfeed.aspx.

myDiveOnline.com’s Top Five Dive Destinations and Dive Operators

2009-05-08T20:11:00.002+02:00

Below are the top 10 dive destinations and dive operators that have been viewed the most over the past 60 days.

Top Visited Dive Destinations

Top Visited Dive Operators

Singapore

Blue Marlin Dive Centre

Blue Marlin Dive - Welcome to Indonesia and diving at Blue Marlin Dive PADI diving School in Lombok, Gili Islands, Lombok Indonesia. Blue Marlin is located on the Gili islands of close to Lombok near Bali, lombok gili island, Indonesia.

Thailand

Thailand is probably the best known, and most developed, of all dive-destinations in South-East Asia. With access to the Andaman Sea in the west, and the Gulf of Thailand in the east, and a well developed tourism infrastructure, it is easy to understand why.

Sipadan Scuba

Sipadan Scuba is Borneo's first and only ‘PADI 5-star IDC Training Centre and National Geographic Dive Center’, the highest ratings obtainable for dive centers.

Indonesia

Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket

Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket, Thailand was founded by Mike Stark. Since beginning operations in 1992 Scuba Cat Diving has become Phuket,Thailand's most complete dive centre with the first liveaboard in the Similan Islands.

Puerto Galera

Sea Pearl Dive Center

SEA PEARL DIVE CENTER is a one stop, full facilities center: SCUBAPRO - UWATEC distributor and service center for Indonesia. PADI Dive Education, in English. SSI Dive Education, In Indonesian & English. Dive Training Pool, 4 meter deep, on location. Air Fill. Rental , Scubapro dive gear & tanks. Dive trips local or in other Eastern Indonesian exotic locations

Tioman Island

East Marine Arwana Dive Centre

A passion for diving over many years brought three friends together - from different walks of life, our combined interests, knowledge and expertise - about scuba diving and its associated equipment, boats and the sea, business and the service industry – serve as a solid, broad base for East Marine which we started in 1993.

Dive in Puerto Galera with a myDiveOnline.com Discount

2009-04-28T11:25:00.001+02:00

Action Divers in Puerto Galera offer myDiveOnline.com users a 12% discount on diving and PADI courses.

Top Dive Operators on myDiveOnline.com

2009-04-06T14:02:00.006+02:00

South-East Asia is chock full of places to go diving, and companies to go diving with. myDiveOnline.com helps you find the right diving company for you. We have the most comprehensive list of dive operators in South-East Asia, complete with ratings and reviews. Some dive operators are big and focus on volume and others are smaller and focus on a more personal experience.

Through our statistics, we provide an easy glimpse on both who are top rated, and who gets the most visitors.

Do you disagree with the rankings? Is there a dive operator that you want to highlight? Let us know via our ratings and review functions!

myDiveOnline.com’s Top Five Dive Operators x 2

Here are the dive operators that get the highest ratings together with those that have had the most visitors at myDiveOnline.com over the past 60 days.

Top Rated

Top Visited

Kon-Tiki Lanta

Welcome To Kon-Tiki Thailand & The Andaman Sea…… Looking for the best thing to do on your holiday in Thailand? Diving and snorkeling in Krabi, Koh Lanta, Phuket or the Similan Islands? With more than 30 years of experience in Southern Thailand, Kon-Tiki Thailand, can offer you a full range of daily dive trips, PADI scuba diving courses from beginner to Pro, Live-aboards, snorkeling trips, freediving courses and technical diving.

Blue Marlin Dive Centre

Sipadan Scuba

Sipadan Scuba is Borneo's first and only ‘PADI 5-star IDC Training Centre and National Geographic Dive Center’, the highest ratings obtainable for dive centers.

Mermaid Resort

Welcome to Paradise Mermaid Resort is located in the peaceful Scuba Diving Paradise of Puerto Galera on the tropical Island of Mindoro, Philippines! Mermaid Resort offers 30 spacious guest rooms and suites. All of our rooms are exclusively furnished and come with all of the amenities that you can rightfully expect from a modern hotel resort.

Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket

Action Divers

Get into Action & dive Puerto Galera, best scuba diving in the Philippines! Situated in beautiful Puerto Galera, one of the world's premier scuba diving resort destinations, Action Divers offers the highest standards of personalized service, uncompromising safety and exceptional value.

East Marine Arwana Dive Centre

Colona Liveabords and Dive Centre

Colona Liveaboards own and operate two liveaboards, the MV Colona VI (Similans & Phi Phi) and MV Giamani (Burma & Similans). They are also a full service PADI dive centre and offer the full range of day trips to all the best sites that the Andaman Sea has to offer. Located at the Hilton Arcadia Resort & Spa in Karon, Phuket.

Watercolours Dive Centre

Watercolours is situated on the Perhentian Islands of Malaysia. We are a small independent company with two beautiful resorts and a dive centre to offer you a choice of accommodation styles for your holiday. The Impiani Resort has spacious, air-conditioned chalets.

Q1 2009 vs Q4 2008

2009-04-06T13:57:00.004+02:00

Now that Q1 is behind us, it's time to take stock and compare to Q4:

Visits - up 30%
Unique visitors - up 33%
Pageviews - up 74%
Pages/visit - up 34%
Bounce rate - down 8%
Average time on site - up 24%
New visits - up 2%

These numbers are even more impressive if we consider that Q1 is a few days shorter than Q4. To compound this, we also had significant problems with outages and the system being down.

March Statistics

2009-04-01T09:53:00.004+02:00

March was yet another record month - this thing really keeps growing! Some brief statistics from Google Analytics:

Visits up 41%
Pageviews up 80%
Bounce rate down by 14%
Time on site up 71%

While slightly less reliable, Alexa has the following nice things to report:

Reach: +140%
Pageviews: +500%
Pageviews/user: +160%
Bouncerate: -33%
Time on site: +61%

Good news all around!

Yet Another Outage

2009-03-19T09:49:00.002+01:00

There was another outage yesterday, this time for 3 hours. Apparently it was due to a technical problem with the Internet - we've received the following explanation from our hosting provider:

There was an issue with routing today in our San Diego datacenter. Global Crossing, a maintainer of a large backbone in California, experience intermittent timeouts and latency. This filtered down to all machines that use that section of the backbone, including our San Diego datacenter. Your site should be resolving normally at this time, though you may experience some slowness while Global Crossing and our upstream providers work to resolve their respective issues. Please advise if you continue to have any issues with your domain

Rankings on myDiveOnline.com

2009-03-17T17:04:00.002+01:00

We now know that roughly 25% of all visitors click through to a dive operator’s website. For the past month or so, we’ve been tracking not just what is popular on myDiveOnline.com, but also what pages get visitors to click to go to a dive operator’s own website.

The top ten websites that myDiveOnline.com sent visitors in the past month are:

Blue Waters Borneo, Kota Kinabalu
Blue Marlin Dive Centre, Gili Trawangan
E-Dive, Kota Kinabalu
Tanjung Aru Tours Travel, Kota Kinabalu
Spice Dive, Bali
7 Seas Aquanauts, Lapu Lapu City
Sipadan Scuba, Sipadan
Action Divers, Puerto Galera
East Marine Arwana Dive Centre, Pulau Perhentian
Geko Dive, Padang Bai

There's also been a minor update to the RSS newsfeed for MDO updates - you can now see a small map of where the updated area/dive operator is.

February update

2009-03-11T12:36:00.002+01:00

The trend from January held steady in February, which confirms that the redesign worked well in getting visitors to stay longer. Alexa.com reported a 230% growth in reach and a big jump in ranking over the past three months.

Out of a total of 89 countries, the top 5 visiting countries are:

UK
USA
Thailand
Malaysia
Singapore.

Minor update

2009-03-11T12:30:00.002+01:00

Just a very brief update: Some of the dive shop owners have started to update the text for different destinations on myDiveOnline.com. This is great, and we really appreciate it. To express our thanks for their help in maintaining the information updated we will now:

Provide a caption saying “sponsored by [Dive Shop Name]” and a link to their dive shop on every page that they update.
Update the newsfeed with a link to their dive shop for every update that they make.

This will help to improve the quality of information myDiveOnline.com!

Let us know what you think and if you run into any problems with this new functionality.

Further outages

2009-02-20T13:18:00.001+01:00

Once again myDiveOnline.com was down - this time between roughly 02.30 at 07.10 GMT. Our apologies for this. We're working with the hosting company to investigate why outages are becoming more frequent - this month so far there have been 5 unplanned outages, not counting the server move.

Outage

2009-02-06T23:51:00.002+01:00

Apologies for the outage today. Our hosting provider decided to move the server, which caused an outage of up to 8 hours and due to the time difference we were unable to make contingency arrangements.

January Stats

2009-02-06T10:00:00.003+01:00

Some quick stats for January compared to December

Visits up 21%
Unique visitors up 14%
Pageviews up 76%
Average pageviews/visit up 45%
Average time on site up 104%
Bounce rate down 9%
New visits as share of total down 8%

It's too early to say yet, but it's a promising indication that the redesigned site is managing to get visitors to stay longer on the site and explore it more.

Registered users now also have the possibility of editing descriptions of travel destinations. There will be a more formal system for giving users credit for their work in the future, but for now they'll only be thanked via the "last updated by" info.

Making the most of myDiveOnline.com

2009-01-16T13:41:00.002+01:00

As a dive operator, you have the freedom to present yourself in any way you want to. This can include publishing photos as well as videos on your myDiveOnline.com page. Some operators are already doing this, and we'd like to highlight them as examples

Sipadan Scuba, Borneo have included a youtube video from one of their dive tours.

Scuba Cat Diving, Phuket has a very nice set of photos from their boat and dives. They also have a very complete description of their trips and of what they do.

Sea Rovers Diving, Bali have a very nice collage together with a good description of their operation.

New Version Live

2009-01-12T20:00:00.002+01:00

The new version that was previously running on http://test.myDiveOnline.com is now live. Please let me know if you find any bugs or problems with this new version.