Ejoh

I spend about five to ten minutes on Digg every day looking for new interesting stories about web design and tech related news. I’m not a dedicated Digg fan, I mean it’s not like Reddit, Dzone or DesignFloat, but I find interesting things there from time to time. One major difference between Digg and Reddit is for example that more bloggers get featured on the front page at Digg. That could be a good thing, not just getting articles from big established sites. In most cases though, that is a bad thing. You’ll soon understand why.

Let’s say a guy has written an outstanding blog post about Apple. He submits his site to Digg like he usually does but does not hope for much. To his surprise the story receives quite a few up votes and he gets all excited. The guy’s not very optimistic though and leaves for playing football thinking his story won’t be featured. But eventually it does and gets a whole lot of visitors. The site has a lot of big JPG images on it and is running Wordpress and soon the huge traffic has taken it down.

Digg visitors like myself click on the link and when they find out the site is down they get really mad. At least I do. So what should this guy have done. I have seen many guys jiddering about the “Digg effect” in articles and every time I think they’re going to present some quality ideas on how to prevent their sites from being taken down. I am always wrong.

To some point I think a site owner owe it to his visitors to keep his site online. I have, when featured on the Digg frontpage managed to stay online. So please, all bloggers who’s intention is to get Slashdotted or Digged, try to prepare. Don’t waste my precious time clicking links just to find out your site is unreachable.

Now I’m going to list a few sites with high quality tips on how to handle large loads of traffic.

Links

• Dealing with the Digg Effect
• How set Wordpress up to cache your posts.
• Handling the Digg effect on a standard shared hosting account
• Could your hosting company handle 1 GB per hour without complaining?
• Postscript to the Slashdot Effect
• Surviving a Digging and the Futility of Statistics
• The digg effect - a visual analysis
• Tips to Get Slashdotted and Survive Slashdot Effect