Surviving the Digg Effect
April 3, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: Traffic
Last Friday (March 30th, 2007) our post entitled 10 Lessons Frank Miller’s 300 Can teach you about Successful Online Business marked our first article to reach the front page of Digg. As you might expect, our traffic went through the roof for a day or so, then slowly disappeared for the most part. As of today, we are still receiving quite a few hits directly from our front page appearance, but it appears for the most part things have gotten back to normal.
Overall, our appearance on Digg was really good for our site. By far the best thing that came out of it was the exposure we received to thousands of new potential readers. Of those readers, literally hundreds have decided to stick around as subscribers and regular readers. So to each of you, I say welcome!
I thought I would talk a bit about steps we took to ensure we survived the Digg effect. Throughout the 3 days or so where traffic was very high on our site, we managed to stay accessible at almost all times. We did go down for 20 minutes, but that was a manual takedown by our web service provider (they thought we were being spam attacked) and a simple phone call got us back up and running.
Here are a few things we did, and you should consider doing for your next article that gets a lot of traffic at Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, etc.
1) Make sure you have some kind of caching plugin installed for WordPress. We’re using Wp-Cache 2.0 which seems to work amazingly well for our site. Cache plugins use static HTML pages to show your article instead of dynamic PHP and MySQL content which can seriously eat up resources on your server.
2) Keep your dynamic content to a minimum. This is actually something I think we need to work on more ourselves. Tools like MyBlogLog Widgets and Top Commentator lists can slow your load times as well as use up your bandwidth. In most cases, if you have a ton of PHP and MySQL calls every time your page loads, your server will have trouble handling it all.
3) Notify your web host about what’s going on as soon as you know your traffic is going to increase substantially. A lot of times, they have contingency plans for just such a scenario, and can temporarily give your site the resources it needs to stay active. This is especially important when you are using a shared hosting system like we are 
Really, those are easy keys to survival for most sites. Until you move on to a dedicated hosting package where you have much more control, these tips will hopefully help you survive as long as possible. If you have any other tips and tricks to surviving the Digg Effect, or just some stories about how your site did in a similar situation, please drop us a line. We’d love to hear about it!
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Another tip: get your domain banned like me. Digg will never get me!
if you use the wp-chache what else does it limit you too?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by limit me to, but so far I have no really had any conflict images with any plugin I’ve used on the site. WP-Cache basically just uses a static HTML page to display your previously visited posts with the exception of any items you specifically say need to remain dynamic.
The tool itself is smart, so if someone posts a comment or you post a new post, it automatically refreshes the cache so the page is current. Pretty much the only thing you would have to worry about is something like a rotating advertising banner, which would not update properly unless you remembered to set it up right with WP-Cache.
Other then that though, it was pretty straight forward.
This is one great advice. Although I haven’t experienced the digg effect yet, having read your post, I think I better get my site ready,just in case.
Thanks!
wow.. I haven’t been dugged that badly before, but I foresee that it would be a worthwhile learning experience.
What is your hosting company/solution?
I’m using Site5 for this site. They are pretty good so far. I have been with A LOT of different companies too, and these guys are the best thus far…