The Digg Effect
April 13th, 2007 Filed in: News & Updates Jump to commentsAs you might have noticed that my site is loading very slow today and sometime not even available. This is because someone submitted my iTheme (WordPress theme) to Digg. The good news: I was dugg, but the news: my site was completely down last night for couple hours. If you were on my site last night, you probably had experienced the downtime. This is known as the "Digg effect". Digg effect is "the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic."
Usually, my server (Media Temple’s dedicated server) is very stable which can manage my high traffic site (12,000+ visitors daily). But I was very disappointed that it couldn’t handle the Digg effect. As soon my link made to the Digg front page, my site immediately became very slow and sometime unavailable. This is cause by the high demand of server requests and database queries. There was nothing much I could do about it since my server’s CPU was at 100%. Well, I guess it is time to look for a better host or server upgrade.
The chart below shows that my site was down for about 6 hours:
Getting dugg is good because it brings you traffic and exposure, but it also has side effects such as server downtime and bandwidth excess. If you think you might get dugg next, be sure to prepare for it. Here are some links on how to handle the Digg effects:
- Ten things you should know about Digg effect
- Surviving the Digg effect
- Dealing with Digg effect
- How to prepare your site for Digg effect
- High traffic tips for WordPress
P.S. I’m very excited to get dugg and thanks to all diggers who dugg my link. Also check out my previous dugg links:
April 13th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Come on… who still uses Wordpress? It is such a bloat, and wastes so much resources. I mean, my applications are way lighter, the best thing that they save is the RAM used and processing time, which is usually massive when using themes in Wordpress…
Best thing that I am thinking of doing is a CGI application that would be built with C++, instead of PHP. This would be way more efficient, because there is way less CPU wastage (code is machine-run straight away), there is more that you can do (for example use a few threads/persistent connections to your database), saving so much of our money wasted on high end machines that have the purpose of running Wordpress ;-)
April 13th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Wordpress is an excellent CMS. You might be right with that, but you need FACTS in order to make a bigger group of people move to that solution. Although, WP is very popular and user-friendly and I think that it’s popularity overtakes the sidekicks it contains. And who knows… maybe they will optimize WP in future
April 13th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
LOL.
And you haven’t been /.’ed yet :P
April 13th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
http://survivedigg.com/
Started because of such causes, not trying to get you to switch hosts, just seen it happen so many times its not funny. Thats the downfall to Digg.
April 13th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Wow that was crazy, I never heard of the Digg Effect! But wow 6 hours straight that is a lot! Anyways currently I am also using WP, but am working on little applications using PHP yo create my own form of Blog site! But for now WP is all the way!
April 13th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I dugged you too! Pretty amazing theme you had there! iTheme! Tested it with other site and its awesome! Truly an amazing design. I was wondering if I can use the icons you used there?
April 14th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Wow!!! I noticed that the site was down trying to access at 3am :P but in one way that’s real good you’ll how your visitors increment in the next days and you can take good advantage of that.
Great work you’ve done so keep doing it! ;)
Bye and it would be nice if you post some replies to the comments some times I haven’t see any replies to comments.
Bye!
April 14th, 2007 at 1:20 am
I was part of that Digg traffic that came through, although I’ve already subscribed to your feed, and have visited the site a number of times.
The Digg traffic really did some damage, I see now. Your page took a good…. 2 min. to load for me, and the background didn’t even load. I’m sure that oen of the things that totally killed your website was not only the hits, but also the downloads. Judging from people asking for alternative links, the visitors plus the people downloading, I see people blaming WP, but I really think it’s more than just WP.
April 14th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Well, it sure is one magnificent theme ^^
Don’t know if I gotta congratulate you on this :P
April 15th, 2007 at 12:17 am
Hey! Just want you to know that I somehow stumbled upon your site (it may have been google, but I don’t remember how it was a few days ago…) and have fallen in love. You’ve been bookmarked and RSS subscribed. Anyhow, I love your portfolio as well as all of your free/cheap stuff. I may have to buy some of those icons in the future.
I don’t think the digg effect would hit me too hard… I’m really lucky to get fifty hits on my blog (not the one listed) in a day. I’m not sure how the new folio will fare. I’ll be one of those people who someone finally diggs and I’m back on the last page or so. :)
iTheme is beautiful, by the way. I’ve just started using it on my blog, and all of its little features keep surprising me… in a good way. Keep up the good work.
April 15th, 2007 at 3:36 am
Dont you just hate the little mac fanboys.
April 16th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Disons que c’est le résultat du succès :)
April 17th, 2007 at 6:27 am
James David beat me to it, SurviveDigg.com is your best option if you hit the digg main page regularly and want your site to get through it without any problems.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Congrats mate on being dugg :), but I read it on your that you have switched to a dedicated server. So even dedicated server was unable to resist Digg effect?
April 18th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Well, congrats on the getting Dugg. It’s probably a good thing that I haven’t experienced the Digg Effect since I’m not on a dedicated server. I’m surprised that Media Temple couldn’t handle it.
April 18th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Glad you got dugg.
Nick, you should try www.survivedigg.com if you feel like you are going to get dugg.
April 20th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Wow, glad that your site got on digg.
The server must of taken a beating.
April 21st, 2007 at 12:07 pm
you’re theme is also in a tutorial of an Italia magazine “Web Designer”
April 22nd, 2007 at 9:40 am
http://www.maxspeeds.com/
hey, see this, a whole clone.
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
That effect was called getting slashdotted, back in the days ;)
April 28th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Nick,
Is it just me, or have you have totally been ripped off?
See www.maxspeeds.com
Or maybe you have released your blog theme and I missed it somewhere?
April 28th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Wow, you’re on a dedicated server and even that couldn’t handle the traffic? That says a lot about the server you bought I guess. What are you paying monthly for it?
And SurviveDigg.com is a joke. You should see some of the transcripts I have of emails regarding how they handle a hard it.
On the other hand, the host I’m with now had zero problems with my most recent article taking a hard hit (hit the #1 spot on Delicious, Dzone, and numerous other places, doing up to 4k/uniques per hour during peak times).
…and I’m on shared hosting.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
By the way, if you’re wondering how a shared host (good one) allows me to handle such large amounts of traffic, they offer MySQL replication and mirroring, so if the load is too high on a server, the IP for my site is immediately (TTL of 1800) changed to another server that has a full mirror of my site ready to go, and another one waiting behind that…
May 5th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
This is usually (or more like used to be) called the “Cnet effect”, this was because back when people heard of Cnet, when they would feature sites and such, it would kill there server… thats why some people like to go with hosting on people like nearlyfreespeach.net. I can’t wait to feel the wrath one day
May 10th, 2007 at 4:04 am
good site!
May 10th, 2007 at 4:05 am
good
May 11th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Uhu! i’d like a digg effect on my site (click on my name)
May 12th, 2007 at 9:00 am
slm
May 12th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Wow, incredible effect !
May 12th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
무방문 대출
May 13th, 2007 at 6:36 am
…isn’t that the sort of situation that mediatemple’s Grid Server should handle?
(I’m also with mt, and long from getting/feeling any digg effects with my rather low-traffic blog; but would be nice to know beforehand…)
May 28th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
[…] The Digg Effect How to handle digg effects | BlinkList | del.icio.us | Furl | Netscape | Newsvine | reddit | StumbleUpon | […]
May 30th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Yea be prepared to get dugged if you have an excelent web site such as this…wish I get dugged once in a while:)
June 1st, 2007 at 7:20 am
The digg effect ?
Nice boost.
For the downtime: I think its more the Wordpress effect, i tried it out a while ago for a site with good traffic, no way to get that to work on the available shared host (regarding the “digg power” i assume that it can happen on your own server as well)
Solution would have been to render the files static, which i had to do with another CMS.
August 16th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
great article
thanks
November 29th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
To avoid the “Digg effect” try implementing a page cache. This saves your server from the necessity of hitting your database for each request. http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ has a good version for wordpress.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
nice effect, loads of traffic
March 17th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
cnet effect, I’ll think it was first caused by slashdot and is known as the slashdot effect. Of course slashdot is only usually for nerds, so it was where majority of the net were at one time.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Wait, I thought the digg effect was when you get more visitors than normal? Isn’t the left half of the graph the digg effect?
It’s ironic that more exposure can bring you less visitors, because your server goes down. I second WP Super Cache; I’m using it on my Wordpress MU network, and it makes everything fast. At least the 2nd visitor and onward in a 24-hour period experiences the fastness. That’s all that matters when you have 1000 people visiting one page in the span of a few minutes, though.
I hope you’ve moved up to better hosting. Great design on the site.
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
The Digg effect can be very crippling if you aren’t prepared for it. You see a lot of sites on Digg front page completely down because they had no idea what was coming.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
When you experienced the digg effect were you using imhosted.com’s hosting services or something more like 1&1 hosting? or some other host? It would seem like a host that provides unlimited transfer would be good for the digg effect in the regards of no money for the transfer bandwidth overages, but at the same time bad because server loads are probably over-extended by low prices and uncapped bandwidth?
You might wanna look into the 70$/month+ range 1&1 virtual hosting packages, or see if your isp offers a package …because for 7$/month you’re probably gonna have that problem from time to time due to being shared hosting?
Appreciated the article on surviving the digg effect, I was awfully confused when I first ran across the term.
-fhn
June 5th, 2009 at 8:27 am
I had this Digg effect once on my News, I didn’t posted the story on Digg and I got a phone call 2:00 in the morning from my BOSS, asking what happened to the site? He said he saw Analytics shooting up towards 19 Thousand Visitors and suddenly the Site was gone.
Then I later found from my webhost that it was due to this Killing Digg Affect.
It wasn’t hurting as we were just in our testing phase and we’ve learned quickly and transfered our Website to a Dedicated Server.