Webomatica

 

Digg Destroys Webomatica

October 28th, 2006

Webomatica was down for most of Friday (and into Saturday) because it was buried by Digg traffic. Digg is a very popular social bookmarking site. The “Digg effect” is basically thousands of web surfers congealing on a site via a link posted on Digg, essentially slowing the server to a crawl.

I liken the experience to lighting a firecracker, realizing it has a short fuse, and quickly throwing it away. Then you realize it landed in your house, exploded, and lit everything on fire. As you watch your house burn down, everyone stands around staring and wondering “What were you thinking?”. Still, it sure is exciting watching the flames.


DuggTrends graph. I think my site died at the diagonal line between 200 and 400 diggs.

Thursday night I wrote a blog post titled Seemingly Stupid Apple Moves That Were Actually Brilliant. It was just another one of my typical Apple posts, pointing out some questionable things Apple has done in the past that ended up working in their favor. I did some research in order to write it, spiced it up with a few images, and thought it was pretty good, but nothing special.

I submitted it to Digg on Thursday evening. It got about 12 diggs and then fell off the first upcoming stories page in the Apple category. I was pleased that it had gotten that many, thought that was the end of it, and went to bed.

The next morning, still groggy, I checked out the story again. It had reached 50 diggs overnight and moved onto the digg technology page. Oh crap, I thought. I immediately fired of an email to my hosting company warning of the impending traffic and swapped out some images to allow the blog to load faster. I didn’t have time to do much else. I went to take a shower.

When I returned after five minutes, the story had hit 150 diggs. My blog was starting to choke under the pressure. I posted the full text of the article in the digg comments, hoping for some salvation.

Then the story hit the Digg front page, and its RSS feeds. I thought about calling in sick but decided to go to work anyhow, taking my MacBook with me so I could survey the damage throughout the day.


837 diggs.

By mid-morning, the story had over 500 diggs and this site was toast. I got a reply back from my hosting company saying they disabled access to the domain because of the traffic coming in. When in doubt, pull the plug.

I took a peek at my traffic logs and it was freaking insane – over 10,000 hits in a few hours on one article, part of my normally pitiful site that struggles to break 1,000 hits a day. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly happened, as I’m sure many of these hits never resulted in a page load. The effect on Alexa was also pretty staggering, Webomatica was pushed up to 8,062 for one brief shining moment before it was shut down.


10,532 page views, most arriving within 2 hours.

Now I need to pick up the pieces. I have to educate myself as to ways to survive the pain and pleasure of the Digg effect. Caching, optimizing my page design, putting elements on another server, or dedicated hosting? All things to consider.

Or maybe, not submitting my blog posts to digg? No, that wouldn’t be any fun. At the end of the day, the post had 771 diggs. Saturday morning 804. Sunday the traffic has died down considerably, and hit 837.

Hopefully, this experience of Digg destroying Webomatica will prove to be a stupid move that turns out brilliant. But the jury is still out on that one.


I was dugg and all I got was this graph.

Note: For the sequel, where my site goes down again because of this post, see: Digg Strikes Back: Webomatica Destroyed (Again).

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  • Ed
    Wow, so fame and adulation do come at a price when it is all unexpected! I would be amazed at double figure diggs for an article, period, as I have been submitting stuff to Digg for a while without a flicker. In fact I have accumulated in 2 months less diggs than you probably received during a pee break last Friday! Well done.
  • Ed, thanks... still picking up the pieces here. Glad it happened just before the weekend so I have some time to fix things on the site. Thanks for stopping by.
  • jack
    I recently found a very interesting website:
    http://alreadylinked.com/
    There you can purchase ad space for your Blog etc.
  • Uh... so someone submitted this post to Digg. Right now it's at 30 diggs.
  • Yeah, this is on the front page. Prepare to be shut down again. It's either feast or famine.
  • Dmitry
    I see your images load very slow at the moment, you can outsource your images for instance on http://www.yourep.com you get html/bb code back.
  • 78
    diggs
  • Who ever thought that a story detailing one's 15 minutes of fame would result in....another 15 minutes. Lucky you! Nice writing, by the way.
  • Well... the writing is better on this one since I had some "downtime" to work on it. Looks like I may be having some more downtime.

    Duggmirror.... cache this thing baby...
  • Name
    "All things to consider.
    Or maybe, not submitting my blog posts to digg?"

    That sounds like a great idea! Stop submitting your own blog posts to Digg. If its not interesting enough for someone else to submit then don't submit it yourself. I bury every story I find that is submitted by the blog owner. Blogs are the worst digg submissions there are. Don't worry. In no time your blog will go back to not being read and spam referral traffic will be your best customer.
  • Poor guy
    It's happening all over again I think, its at 215 now.
  • Well it's on page 5 of Digg now, and took a little while to load, but is online. (633 diggs).
  • it's the recursive effect.. :P
  • Okay... site back. I really need to make some changes to this blog. This article reached 627 diggs.
  • Crash... you happened to visit it after it was on the front, died, and is now back. But thanks for visiting...

    Name, I hear you, I think I'm going to lay low for a while and refrain from posting my own blog stuff to digg. However, obviously I can't stop other people from posting links ... as happened this time around.... argh.
  • Lee
    That's pretty tacky that your host cut you off. They are supposed to support your growing business/web site. Not drop you when you have success.
  • Lee, that may be true. One comment on digg suggested looking into \"VPS\" hosting.

    But my first step is to tweak some stuff on this wordpress installation... namely the cache plug in and using less images... any other suggestions I\'m all ears at this point.
  • MV
    http://www.coralcdn.org/

    Are you tired of clicking on some link from a web portal, only to find that the website is temporarily off-line because thousands or millions of other users are also trying to access it? Does your network have a really low-bandwidth connection, such that everyone, even accessing the same web pages, suffers from slow downloads? Have you ever run a website, only to find that suddenly you get hit with a spike of thousands of requests, overloading your server and possibly causing high monthly bills? If so, CoralCDN might be your free solution for these problems!

    Using Coral

    Taking advantage of CoralCDN is simple. Just append

    .nyud.net:8080

    to the hostname of any URL, and your request for that URL is handled by Coral!
  • I wonder when only can digg effect destroys my blog... Hehe... Anyway, this post went to digg front page again...

    Congratulations.
  • jamesr
    or you could just use movable type instead of a toy like wordpress and your blog wouldnt die when people want to read it the most.
  • I've start submitting even, news of entertainment, news of the world ...etc, but I've never get more 38 diggs. Who knows when is going to be your history in the main page? today, tomorrow or never... but I think digg could be a little adictive...
  • Bah, don't listen to Name. If you've got quality content that you think the Digg audience would find useful or enjoy reading, I say submit it. What else are you supposed to do, cross your fingers and hope that a passerby happens to be a Digg user, then happens to think of sharing, then happens to actually divert from whatever brought them to the site in the first place in order to submit it??

    Hogwash. As long as a person doesn't cross that line into spam country, I see absolutely know problem with the practice. It's certainly more honest than having a friend or other third-party coordinate to do it.
  • Thanks tunequestor... everyone has their reasons for doing things and lines to cross. At this point I'm refraining from submitting my own stuff to digg so I don't bring my site down yet again, annoying my hosting company further. But yeah I won't rule it out in the future.
  • Same thing happened to me last December. Those diggers sure do love their movies:
    http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/81-movi...

    I find you get better results if you don't submit your own content to digg. People are really anti-blog (understandably).
  • Heh, yeah I've cooled down on submitting my own stuff to digg. It's fun every once in a while but the traffic doesn't seem that sticky... it's more like a supernova than a steady warmth of a fire.

    I'll definitely check out your link though!
  • thank you!
  • I had the same thing with Digg some months ago.
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