Yesterday I submitted my 9 resume tips to Reddit (post). I was unprepared for the onslaught of traffic. My traffic jumped from about zero visitors the day before to something like 9000 in only a few hours. For the most part, the server handled it. There were a lot of comments (some good, some bad), but overall, I felt that the post was well-received. I even made it to the front page of Del.icio.us Popular for a while.
Once all the hubbub died down today, I hoped to put up a new post. Most of the day, I was busy with interviews. This afternoon, however, I had some personal downtime, so I thought I’d get something posted. Unfortunately, my blog had some downtime, too. The “9 tips” post made it to the front page of Digg News (post). The Digg traffic absolutely dwarfed the Reddit traffic. My host (Bluehost) has a 20% CPU limit which they were unwilling to lift, even temporarily, so my site was up and down (mostly down) for several hours. Still, even with the server going up and down, the site took in over 15000 visitors, not including the masses that received the “server down” message. The post finally slipped onto the second page, and my site came back up.
I have a request of the new readers: If you’ve got a host you love, please let me know. And let me know what kind of hosting plan you’ve got. I’ve contacted a couple of other bloggers to see what they recommend, but I’m interested in all the input I can get. I can’t really afford a dedicated server, and honestly, I don’t think I need it. I just want a host who can (and is willing to) bear me through any more traffic spikes. I don’t want my site going down every time I manage to post something that people like. It might never happen again, but I’d rather be prepared, just in case. It may turn out that I just have to move to a more expensive package (with Bluehost or elsewhere), but I want to hear others’ experiences first.
I’ll try to get back to my regular updating now. Thanks, and welcome, to all the new readers. I hope you enjoy what you’ve read so far, and I hope you’ll enjoy what I post in the future. (Topping the “9 tips” is going to be hard.)
I’m also always open for reader suggestions/comments/whatever. Please, feel free to leave a comment on any post, or email me, if you prefer.
10 Comments on “How Reddit and Digg Killed My Server (Wow. Just wow.)”
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Gelaed | The Blog » Blog Archive » Slacker Stuff Says:
February 11th, 2007 at 3:48 pm[...] got over thirty-eight thousand visits over the past three days. I put up a post discussing how Reddit and Digg killed the server over there. Traffic continued to flow in after that post, but at a much more manageable [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 1:43 am
I’d hop over to dreamhost.com. I’ve been using them for a few months now, and I’ve been very happy with how they handle my account. Also, if you want to save some money starting out, use promo code MAX97. It takes $97 off your first year’s hosting bill (level 1 only), bringing it down to somewhere around $20 for 200GB space and 2TB bandwidth per month.
February 10th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Use GoDaddy.
Most people on Digg recommend this as one of the best.
February 10th, 2007 at 11:53 am
I use Servertag.net, talk to the owners Dan and Dan they are very flexible guys and quite dedicated. The price is a little more than your bargain hosts but thus far they have demonstrated to me they are worth it.
Go to their forum and look for sTag-Dan. His profile will have his AIM. Cheers!
February 10th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I also suggest dreamhost.com I use them for my website (click my name) and I used the code AUSTARS for $97 off a 1 year plan, so I ended up paying $22.97 for 1 year of hosting plus a free domain name, and then it will be 10$ a month after.
February 11th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Thanks for the input, guys. I’m afraid that any of the budget hosts (Dreamhost, GoDaddy) are going to have the same CPU usage problem. From what I’ve seen, both of those two have had hosted sites go down as a result of a Digg.
Servertag looks a little more promising, though I think shared hosting in general is going to have this problem unless I get a pretty high CPU usage cap. Servertag’s dedicated hosting is quite affordable, though. If I go that route, I’ll definitely keep them in mind.
For now, I’ve added caching to my blog, so that should take some of the load off if it gets really hit again.
Again, thanks for the help.
February 14th, 2007 at 2:43 am
Exactly – my smaller sites run on Dreamhost and when they get Dugg they cap the connection limit to 6 per second, so you’re turning away over 200 people per second! There’s really no substitute to dedicated hosting, but even then you’re going to hit some bottlenecks until you set up a load balanced pair. EV1 (now ThePlanet) is fairly reasonable if Servertag doesn’t work out for you.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the articles on your site. Good stuff
February 14th, 2007 at 7:44 am
Thanks, Niero. I’ll keep them in mind for the future.
For now, I’m going to stick with BlueHost. They still seem to be about as good as any of the budget hosts, from what I’ve read. I’ve added a caching plugin to wordpress that will hopefully help, but I’ll have to see.
If I start getting dugg on a regular basis, I’ll look into some sort of upgrade path again.
February 23rd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Not that I’ve ever gotten any kind of huge traffic, but I’d suggest using some sort of caching. Cut down on CPU and DB connections. If you know that the traffic might be expected maybe just convert the page to a completely static html file. WordPress has wp-cache, otherwise do something like ILoveJackDaniels.com: Caching output in PHP.
February 24th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I’m using wp-cache now, but I won’t be able to really find out how capable it is unless I get dugg again. Hopefully it will be sufficient. I hate to go static because then comments will have to be disabled on the page (at least temporarily).
January 2nd, 2012 at 10:43 am
Does anyone know if there's a mobile comma disaster response unit? If not, want to create one? #joplin #disasterrelief