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Get By EmailDigg Destroys Webomatica
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).
Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.
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"Thanks - i'll mention the one day twitter boycott too. But a big reason why I'm okay with leaving Twitter temporarily is because I have FriendFeed - my cojones are not that big." -
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.
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.
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.
[...] This guy is describing how his blog got “destroyed” by Digg because it had about 10,000 hits in a few hours. I don’t get this. We used to run OSNews (version 2) on a dual Celeron 466 Mhz (we now run on Xeons) and when we were getting Slashdotted back in the day, the server would work fine for up to 45,000 pages per hour served! It worked fine. Today, Adam’s rewrite of OSNews (version 3) continues to work fine when Digged or Slashdotted. [...]
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…
“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.
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..
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.
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.
[...] I finally got access to my blog again on Saturday, and described the experience in a post titled Digg Destroys Webomatica. Some kind soul submitted that post to Digg on Saturday night. By the time I realized this on Sunday morning, the story had 30 diggs. [...]
[...] Webomatica has a post on how the digg effect can blitz your bandwidth allowance in a heartbeat and provides a good insight into the correlation between ‘diggs’ and traffic stats. [...]
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I wonder when only can digg effect destroys my blog… Hehe… Anyway, this post went to digg front page again…
Congratulations.
[...] Read more here… [...]
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 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.read more | digg story Links [...]
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…
[...] Digg Destroys Webomatica » Webomatica (tags: blogging digg effect) [...]
[...] Webomatica is still recovering from the wave of double digg destruction that swept in last weekend. It started with my first ever digg front page story, Seemingly Stupid Apple Moves That Were Actually Brilliant. The resulting “digg effect” took my site down. I then wrote another blog post Digg Destroys Webomatica, which also hit the digg front page, ironically destroying my site once again. This all happened over three days. [...]
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.
[...] Digg Destroys Webomatica » Webomatica (tags: blogging digg) [...]
Same thing happened to me last December. Those diggers sure do love their movies:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/81-movies-for-geeks-that-do-not-suck-ggg7/
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!
[...] This is the third time Webomatica has dealt with the Digg effect. Here’s my obligatory “dugg” post, with some info-porn graphics like last time. [...]
[...] post about my site getting taken down became my second front page digg: Digg Destroys Webomatica (839 diggs). The second time was not as fun as it was completely unexpected, and it also ground my [...]
I had the same thing with Digg some months ago.