How to Survive Digg on a Shared Host
- Posted by B Jones on January 1st, 2008 - Comment on this Post »
Getting onto the front page of Digg is quite an honor. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a handful of my sites and articles hit the front page of Digg. It’s not all strawberries and peaches though. If you’re not prepared for it, it can actually be the biggest headache of your life.
After my first experience of getting dugg, having my site go down, struggling to get tech support (who had no clue what Digg even was) to help me, and finally getting back up only to go down again, I decided that I needed to take some action.
Getting a dedicated host just wasn’t an option at the time, so I needed to come up with some other ways to protect my poor little sites, just in case this happened again.
I searched for “How to survive Digg”, and found several tips, which I’m sure a lot of you have heard of, like making the page static, talking to your hosting provider, slimming down the page, removing widgets, etc…
They all seemed like good tips, but unfortunately, they didn’t work for me, so I decided to come up with my own solution. It uses PHP, but if your site uses some other language, you can modify it accordingly.
This code basically limits the traffic to a page. As it is set, this code will let one out of 4 people view your page. This is most useful during the first hour that your site is on Digg, because that is when it the pounding is at it’s heaviest.
First, if the page is database driven or dynamic, you’ll definitely want to make most of it static, and remove as many images as possible. Then, add this at the very beginning of the page (before anything else).
<?php
//put this code at the very beginning of your page, before anything else
$randomdigg = rand(1,4);
if($randomdigg != 1){
exit("Thanks for visiting, but the site is under a great deal of stress due to being on the front page of Digg. Please try back in a few moments. Thanks!");
} ?>
This part of the code can be adjusted as needed.
$randomdigg = rand(1,4);
If you feel that 1 of 4 is still to heavy, you can change the 4 to a 6. Or if you feel like traffic is starting to subside, move it down to a 2.
This may seem like a really silly solution, but in my experience, when dealing with cheap budget shared hosting, it is pretty much the only thing I’ve found that works.
It’s also really important to remember that the most important part of surviving Digg is being aware of when your site is submitted.
Otherwise, you won’t be able to implement any of these precautions in time.
I use some more complex methods, but the easiest way to know when your site has been submitted is by monitoring your referrals with something like Google Analytics or Statcounter.com
I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on this, and any tips that you might want to share.
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January 1st, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Great story - but even better bloody-digg icon!
Can I get one and use it legally?
January 1st, 2008 at 9:35 pm
I don’t know how legal it is. I just threw it together in photoshop. I didn’t think Digg would mind.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 am
Badi,
Why not put the code in the PHP prepend file? That would make it site-wide and therefore dampen the load quite a bit through-out.
Might also be useful to tweak it to bounce at different rates depending on the requested URL. So if it’s a blog post being asked, it will get pulled from a cache (you do run WP Super Cache, right?). If it is a tool, it might be worth bouncing at a higher rate to avoid straining the server.
Pierre
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 am
Hey Pierre,
No, I actually haven’t heard of WP Super Cache (http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/) but it looks like a great plugin, and would probably work great for someone with a better host.
However, I seriously doubt it would hold up if one of my sites on my cheap shared host got dugg.
Only reason I say that is because I’ve tried totally removing all dynamic parts of a page before having it go popular on Digg. So it’s totally static. But still, the server can’t handle it. The 500 errors start to show right away.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Do you mean that when our website is listed at digg.com on their main page for a while or whatever time and if we are on shared server, our site gets too much load? Does the server load increases?
Is this case, if we are on dedicated server, server load won’t be there?
If you put some more light on my questions, it would be nice and help others too
Thank you
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Hey Abdul.
Being on a dedicated machine/ host doesn’t guarantee you anything. Sites on dedicated hosting can crash too if you’re not careful.
So yes, if your site is on shared hosting, and gets on the front page of digg.com. I have seen as much as 19,458 pageviews per hour, and I’m sure that isn’t nearly as high as it gets. That sort of load will test any average server.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
You haven’t commented out ‘anything else’ on the third line, so I’m afraid, the script is going to fail. You need to add // there to make it work.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:31 am
All in all, great idea. However, I would suggest redirecting the random number visitor to a mirror site using header(); Generating a static copy of the page that can be uploaded to a friend’s server or a mirror service is pretty quick and easy and it would ensure that everyone would get to see the original content.
Of course, that is if you have access to mirror servers. I don’t know if there are any free mirror services out there for this kind of thing.
With a bit of tweaking, this could be useful for a wide range of sites and hosting budgets. You could even use a variation of this to load balance between multiple MySQL servers for dynamic sites if needed.
January 4th, 2008 at 10:13 am
What shared hosting provider do you use?
I have experimented with a few, and while some are better than others I ended up giving up completely on shared hosting. I had experimented with Aplus.net, MediaTemple, Apollo, Bluehost, and Mosso. Other than the Digg issue, how has your host been?
January 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
@JMorris
That’s definitely a good idea, but for me, and for SEO purposes, the only benefit of getting to the front page of Digg is for the backlinks. If you were to route 1/2, 2/3 or 3/4 of all requests to mirrors on other domains, then people would link to those other domains instead of yours.
It would definitely work for survival though. Good idea.
@Chris Hartwell
I have used this technique successfully on 1and1 shared hosting (which is fine under steady traffic, but really weak under a hard hit like Digg), and also Dreamhost. It works perfectly.
This little script is really neat, because if you adjust the script to allow more traffic than the site can handle, it’s totally obvious. Site slows down, and starts to give 500 errors. Then when you allow less traffic, the page loads fine.
January 4th, 2008 at 11:01 am
btw, I have no idea why my wife’s MyBlogLog avatar is appearing on my comments!!! I’m trying to get to the bottom of this…haha
January 4th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Lol
I’m using the “MyAvatars” plugin, and that’s definitely not your MBL avatar. It’s a mystery for now…
January 4th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
You’re point about the SEO/backlink factors is a good one.
One option would be to append to the header and footer of the page that it is a mirror due to the high load on the server and provide a javascript bookmark link. When the traffic slows down, replace the page with a 301 redirect point to the original home.
Not the best solution, but it would work if you can’t afford a high end dedicated server setup.
Still, interesting approach. I’ll bookmark this for the future.
January 7th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
great post
January 8th, 2008 at 7:14 am
True, in regards of the backlinks.
ps. the Fake PageRank detection doesn’t give correct results. When someone change server the result is “fake PR” although it isn’t.
January 16th, 2008 at 1:34 am
I’ve transfered my domain to another
server….
before my pr was 5 and now is 0 !!
Why ?? pages are the same !
http://www.sfondi-desktop-computer.com
January 16th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Wish i could have a Pr 0
my website is kind of new
and after 4 months stil not have
any pr !
how can i fix it quickly ?
http://www.tatuaggi-maori-gratis.it
February 12th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I have a better solution:
http://mpwebwizard.com/posts/2006/12/17/using_a_mirror/
Enjoy!
February 17th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Nice article, that’s the downside of getting on the first page, especially when not prepared!
February 19th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Hey, I like the little bit of code there. That would work nicely if my site ever got on the first page of dig lol