Can You Digg It?
By Jeffrey | April 20, 2007
Otherwise known as: “How Not To Sleep For 24 Hours Straight”
The last day and a half has been a rather headache filled one because of a double edged sword that struck this site Wednesday evening.
The story The Best Game Scenes You Might Have Missed struck the front page of Digg and my visitor count - and server usage - went through the roof.
The question was: Could I Digg It?
What Happened?
At first, I thought I could.
For the first 6 hours or so that the story was in the queue on Digg it was sitting at around 30 Diggs. It was slowly rising, but not at a rate that made me think it would hit the front page.
I stopped watching for a couple hours to make an attempt to be social with some friends, then came back after a while.
That’s when I got excited.
The story was now on the front page at 119 Diggs and increasing by 10 or so Diggs every time I refreshed the page. The amount of traffic I knew this would generate made me elated.
I was a little nervous about possible server usage (ANHosting limits their shared hosting accounts to 10% at any given time), but since I had not received an e-mail warning me of exceeding that amount - something their Terms of Service said they would do - I wasn’t losing any sleep.
Not yet, anyway.
This is the last count I was able to get from my log file:
The graph, for a visual example:
The Headaches
I later learned that they had placed in a warning in my account on their support site, but I don’t exactly visit that on a daily basis so I was unaware.
After about 2 hours the site was offline, leading to a forbidden error page being displayed. Soon the site would be completely down, displaying “This Account Has Been Suspended”.
That’s when I got worried. I immediately got on the phone with and sent an e-mail to technical support trying to find out what was going on.
I knew, of course, why it had been taken offline, but I wanted to know if it was a permanent removal.
It turned out that it was.
I finally received an e-mail back - I never reached anybody by phone - saying, “The only way that we can get your site back online is if we go with a dedicated or VPS solution.”
This was not a reasonable solution for me. I just don’t have the resources to pay for dedicated hosting.
My main motive at this point was to get a backup of my site files, and transfer to another host - which I have since done.
The Present
After another couple hours I finally had a backup provided to me, which was the biggest relief to me.
And luckily, ANHosting provides you with a pro-rated refund of services not yet used - in my case almost 10 months worth - if they cancel your account for exceeding server usage.
Finally, I now have the site back online after changing the DNS and waiting for the change to propagate. I was never able to fully restore my MySQL database for the site - which is why the comments posted before the crash have incorrect time-stamps - but I am just happy it’s back online.
I have since taken more precautions in ensuring this doesn’t happen again - changing some settings with WP-Cache and enlisting support from Digg-Defender.
Could I Digg It?
The answer simply was: No.
I thought I was prepared for the possible Digg effect, but having it take place showed just how unprepared I actually was.
I have no hard feelings toward ANHosting for what happened. SavvyGeek was in violation of their Terms of Service for server usage at the time so of course I expected the site to be taken offline.
I did not expect my entire services to be cancelled - I think a better solution would have been to just take the site offline until the usage subsided - but such is life on shared hosting.
Would I change anything that happened? Yes and no.
After all, I learned some important lessons about server usage and the Digg Effect and I gained a huge influx of visitors - I was averaging around 600 unique visitors each day before Digg, and now I am well above 1000.
However, if any of you know where to buy some Advil in bulk, feel free to let me know.
Topics: Rants |
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