Ever experienced the Digg tsunami ?
Did you ever experience the Digg tsunami ?
After 2 months of daily blogging which attracted a maximum of 146 users on a peak day, I experienced a real Tsunami when I posted Is there an art of 404 pages on Sunday evening, two days ago now.
I had even made a little personal 404 page in case I would ever be Dugg just for fun. And it happened, ironically.
Error 404 - Not Found
This page has been dugg. My server couldn’t handle the Digg effect.
It is therefore not available anymore. Please come back later.
I didn’t even post about Google or Youtube or Myspace, nor about Microsoft versus Apple, nor about Ipod or Bush or anything. Just the “art of 404 pages”
Monday morning my traffic had peaked overnight. Twice my monthly traffic.
I had posted my article on reddit and I was on the front page. I reached 71 points.
On del.icio.us, 23 people saved my page. ..
Then my server went down.
I checked Google analytics and there was a sudden rush of Diggers in the morning.
I had not posted on Digg, but somebody did for me and I was on the front page with 359 Digg ! What a shock. :)
The page was down with this ugly 404 logo from my host, instead of my very appropriate 404 page.
I still could post in the middle of the storm but I had no homepage :
“Myserver is down since a few hours. Apologies.
It appears I experienced the Digg Tsunami..”
And that was true. Just check out this screenshot of Duggtrends : A real tidalwave.
I came back in the evening and replaced the broken page with a static html file with my original post, so that people could still see it from Digg.
So my traffic went down from 8000 visitors to zero (I forgot to include Google analytics in my static page).
So my blog is back, but still incredibly slow. I tried to delete yesterday’s log file (39 Megas) but it didn’t work.
Still, it was good fun.
Here is tonight’s status.
October 13th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
[...] I happened to be Dugg in October, the site was immediately down and 1and1 moved me to a slow performance environment. [...]