We’re Experiencing the Digg Effect - We Apologize!
Posted by Jody Mitoma on April 6, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Whoopsie. It looks like we got our first taste of the Digg Effect when the Quake article got Dugg all over the place. Sadly, BlueHost, whom we use for our hosting, has an automatic throttle whenever a site uses more than 10% CPU time on the server we’re occupying, and Touch Podium’s SQL queries were banging their servers well beyond 10%, so the result was that most of the time you’d get a CPU Exceeded message whenever you tried to connect here. It all started around 2pm EST, when the story started climing the Hot list of upcoming stories. Then it made the popular list and hit the main page, and that’s when everything went to hell. We were on the phone with BlueHost, but unfortunately that didn’t resolve anything.
On a positive note, things seem to be slowly returning to normal. However, if you get a CPU Exceeded message when you try to connect here or click on a story link, well, this is why.
It’s been a frustrating yet fun ride, so thanks to whomever submitted the story!
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April 6th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Congrats on getting on the front page of Digg, you deserved it Jody!
I would recommend you to install the WP-Cache plugin for Wordpress, that will help your website greatly with the Digg Effect. View the article at the following link for a tutoiral on how to add it:
http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/johnny/2006/09/17/handling-the-digg-effect-with-wordpress-caching/
April 6th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Thanks a million! I saw something about this on another site when I was searching Google for “BlueHost + Digg Effect”. Dang! I should of looked further into it!
Thanks again! Very much appreciated.
April 6th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Congrats on the digg effect for sure! AdSense must’ve went up through the roof, too, simply due to the massive growth in sheer amount of visitors, so that’s always a bonus yay
WP is never good for things like digg… I personally use Movable type whenever I do blogs (which is like, never). It powers blogs for ABC, Adobe, etc. (see: http://www.movabletype.com/solutions/customers.html ) where their usual traffic might be more uber than digg effect already as is. So I think that is quite a good platform to consider, too.
April 6th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Sorry I give you guys the digg effect, but now your site is out there =)
April 6th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Thank you very much Andy. The Digg Effect was definitely unexpected, but it was an amazing experience.
Definitely something I hope Touch Podium sees again sometime in the near future. It multiplied our total amount of site hits by 7 times! I highly doubt we’ll be making any severe moves to new blogging systems anytime soon, but, I’ll take a look at MovableType! Thank you!
XxXKUL, oh no you don’t! Don’t you dare start apologizing to us now! hehe… The Digg Effect was astonishing! It’s definitely something I’ve always wanted my own personal website to get - and thanks to you, it got just that!
The story Digg’s are STILL skyrocketing as we speak! - and we’ve got over 250 people on the site RIGHT now as I am typing this! INCREDIBLE!!
THANK YOU.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Indeed, thanks XxXKUL. We definitely weren’t prepared for the Digg Effect, but we’ve installed the WP_cache plugin, so hopefully that will mitigate some of the problems, if not all. However, this has definitely been an experience. We’ll break 20,000 hits today thanks to you and Digg, which is about six times the normal volume we get around here at the moment, and hopefully that will translate into some new regulars! If nothing else, the publicity will be invaluable.
April 7th, 2008 at 12:11 am
I wasn’t really expecting this story to be quite so popular, and I know all the mayhem of the digg effect and messes up servers… but its a good way to get out on the webz
April 7th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Hi Jody,
Glad you’re surviving!
It would have helped if there was a real link to your page on the BlueHost error page. They just put a link to history on the page and it ends up just returning to their own page permanently after a bit. Not a big deal on their part to fix a bit of sloppy programming…
:-)
April 7th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I couldn’t agree more. That is a disappointing error page, isn’t it?