365questions.org

Update Sunday 15: I am still getting 1000 + visits /hour from Digg since my site is back. Thanks guys.
Update 2 (Monday 16) : 32 000 unique visitors since Saturday 14 evening (32 hours).
I restored the original page.

_______________

My server went down after one of my stories hit the homepage of Digg.

Here is the duggmirror graph on the number of Diggs it received over a few hours.

Here the flow of Traffic from Google analytics : more than 10 000 visitors until it broke down.

It’s the second time I get to Digg homepage. Last time, my host moved me definitively to a much too slow environment, I had to change host.

Now I am with Site5. They had to suspend my account for a while (too much resources used from their shared servers), but the customer service remained in touch with me all the time and restored the site as soon as the traffic peak was over.

Now the page still receives a lot of visits from digg, but without requiring access to the MySql database. Here is what I did :

Before hitting Digg front page, I downloaded my entire page on my desktop as html file.

Then, through FTP, I recreated the path to the page on my server :

I created 4 sub-directories like this :

/2007/04/10/who-has-the-best-sorry-page/

and I uploaded the saved Static page in the last directory. I named it index.html.

Now, incoming visitors from Digg access this page, which is not linked at all to the database. It is completely static (check the feedburner number, which is different from all other pages).

So it acts like a local cache or mirror, but totally transparently for the visitors who can browse the rest of the site (they don’t..).

Voilà !

Thanks Digg. That was a great birthday gift (I turned 36 yesterday).

Related Articles:

• Who has the best sorry page ?
• Are you a-diggted?
• 10 funniest Digg comments?
• Do you speak Web 2.0?
• Ever experienced the Digg tsunami ?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 11:32 am and is filed under Blogging, Real Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.