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:
May 12th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Wow, incredible effect !
May 12th, 2007 at 9:00 am
slm
May 11th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Uhu! i’d like a digg effect on my site (click on my name)
May 10th, 2007 at 4:05 am
good
May 10th, 2007 at 4:04 am
good site!
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
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…
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 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 23rd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
That effect was called getting slashdotted, back in the days ;)