First of all, I have to admit, I’m hooked. I’m fairly new to Digg so until today I haven’t really grasped the power and size of the community. The traffic isn’t *mega* by any means, but when the community decides a story should be voted up there is certainly some serious attention thrown in the direction of many unsuspecting webmasters and bloggers. Today I was one of them.
Last night I submitted a little blurb I wrote about Homestead CEO, Justin Kitch. I honestly didn’t think it would get more than 20 or 30 votes, as most of the stories I find only make it to the 20-30 range. I’ve submitted a few stories that made front page, but they weren’t my sites and I didn’t know the owners so I had no idea what kind of stats they were seeing. This time it was mine though, and when I woke up my stats were showing 5,230 visits within a 3 hour period.
eRodTech is a new blog. I only see about 200 visits a day right now because I’m only getting started. What does that have to do with the Digg submission? Well, my host has warning systems that shut down the site in case of DNS attacks. They decide on the settings based on the average amount of daily traffic. As you’ve probably figured out by now, the Digg traffic was sending red alerts to the server every other minute.
Needless to say, it shut me down. All I can say is bummer. I immediately contacted support, who worked quickly to get the site back up, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was embarrassing. I cringed reading the comments on the Digg post about the site being down. It’s something that nobody wants, and if the proper procedures aren’t followed, it’s inevitable.
Lesson learned…
After the site was shut down a friend chimed in via e-mail and gave me a heads up to this link. Shoemoney explains how to deal with an avalanche of traffic by editing the .htaccess file so that your site re-directs to a mirror.
Make a note of this. I highly recommend it.
Another thing I got from this experience, is the Digg community is a LOT of fun. It’s a rush getting the traffic, but it’s also a rush giving it. I submitted a story about Digg trolls from someone else’s blog about a month or so ago. It almost instantly hit the front page, before being Dugg down of course, but the amount of votes it initially received was almost surreal. I had it as my #1 story and it actually helped other people’s stories, including mine, within my profile continue to get votes.
Today I have a better understanding of the community and how it all works. I know there is a down side to a community of this size, but overall the good outweighs the bad.
Technorati Tags: Digg, Shoemoney, Homestead, Justin+Kitch, social+networking
