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CFD Online is an online center for Computational Fluid Dynamics. Services include several discussion forums, a jobs database, a free CFD reference in the form of a CFD-Wiki, a news and announcement forum, an events calendar, and a comprehensive annotated link section with pointers to CFD resources around the world. CFD Online's goal is to offer high-quality web services to the CFD community. The site is independent and it is financed mainly by banner-ads.
Today CFD Online is the largest and most popular CFD site on the Internet. During a typical week the web site is visited by more than 100,500 people (unique IP addresses), downloading 450,000 web pages per week. In total there are more than 3,200 web sites around the world with links to CFD Online. In 2023 CFD Online celebrated 29 years of uninterrupted service to the CFD community! CFD Online continues to strengthen its position as the world's leading CFD portal. CFD Online is top-listed by all major search engines and has received many awards over the years.
In 2023 CFD Online maintained the very strong traffic seen over the last 10 years. Our web-site traffic has started to grow again, after the decline seen in the recent years. CFD Online now delivers more than 1.9 million web-pages per month to more than 320,000 unique monthly visitors. As last year we see a strong growth in traffic from companies and a small reduction in traffic from Universities. CFD is becoming a more mature science, with less academic research and more industrial use. The bar chart above shows the 12-month trailing average of the number of web pages delivered from CFD Online per month over the last 25 years.
Note that these statistics exclude access from robots and common search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is necessary in order to give a true representation of the traffic from real humans. Otherwise the quickly growing traffic from Google and other search engine robots would completely overshadow human visitors.
Visitors to CFD Online come from typical CFD sites from all over the world. The pie chart below shows the traffic distribution across different top-level domains. Further details about where traffic is coming from can be found in the web server statistics report at https://www.cfd-online.com/Stats/2023/
The location of CFD Online’s visitors is similar to last year. A long-term trend is that more and more countries and companies are hiding behind anonymous numerical or network addresses. For example, most explicit traffic from China is now gone. We still have many users from China though, but they are hidden behind anonymous proxies. Traffic from US Academia has fallen over the precious years and now only accounts for 1%. In Europe traffic from Germany has dropped a bit, after a strong growth in the most recent years. Germany is still without question our largest visitor from Europe. On the browser side Chrome has completely taken over as the most popular browser with 72% of all traffic. On the OS side Windows is still the most common OS. Linux traffic has remained at 11%. Usage of mobile devices continues to grow and Android + iOS now accounts for 14% of our traffic.
The pie chart below shows the relative number of page-downloads for the different services at CFD Online. In total, the discussion forums are still the most popular section, with 74% of all the page-views. The CFD-Wiki has 8%, the CFD Jobs Database 6%, the Events calendar 5%, the Links section 1%, and the News & Announcement section 1% of all page-views.
The traffic distribution between different services have not seen any large shifts in 2023 and are similar to last year. CFD Online remains the most popular meeting place on the net for free and independent discussions about CFD. Users seem to prefer the open forums at CFD Online over closed forums run by code vendors. The following services are currently available at CFD Online:
The largest free online CFD news service, with more than 5,470 news and announcements published since 2001. The news section currently has 6,900 unique visitors every month and more than 5,200 people are subscribed to the weekly email news-digest.
The most popular meeting place on the net for people interested in CFD. The forums have more than 820,000 archived messages in 215,000 threads from the previous 25 years.
CFD-Wiki is intended to eventually become the ultimate free CFD reference and text-book. The content is written collaboratively by thousands of users. CFD-Wiki contains more than 550 articles on various CFD related subjects. Many engineers and students use it as a valuable reference.
The links section is very well known in the CFD world and continues to attract many return visitors year after year. It has been the largest collection of CFD links available on the net since it was introduced in 1994. In 2012 a major overhaul of the whole links section was done.
The CFD Jobs Database is the section that attracts most people. The CFD Jobs Database is visited by more than 1,300 job-seekers every day! It is a very good way to recruit CFD experts. The CFD Jobs Database has had about 170 open positions advertised throughout 2023.
This service is intended to help students and professionals to find CFD related conferences, courses and workshops. Since the service was opened in 2002 more than 3,500 events have been advertised in it.
The tools section contains online tools useful for CFD engineers and students: Two calculators, a unit converter, a Y+ estimation tool and a tool to convert and estimate turbulent properties
The feeds section was launched in 2012; it contains aggregated feeds of CFD news-sources, blogs, vendors, jobs and journals. This service has become an important tool to help people stay up to date.
CFD Online is only responsible for the documents on this server, not for any of the external references. All opinions expressed are personal opinions.
Our servers, installed in June 2015, are still working well. The site is hosted on a virtual server based on Centos KVM technology. The virtual server runs on a dedicated production server with a failover system to quickly switch over to a backup server that stands online ready to take over in case of hardware problems. The production server has two mirrored RAID1 SSD disks and plenty of memory.
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