Last week, after being online for only ten days, this site had an article on the front page of digg.com, Linux.com, LinuxToday.com and several blogs. I’d like to share some of what I learned from “the digg effect.”
As It Happened
Even though I wasn’t feeling well Monday evening, I stayed up late to finish an article I had been working on. I looked at the article again the next morning, and though it’s not the greatest piece of writing ever, I was proud of it, and in an effort to get it in front of as many eyes as possible, I decided to submit it to digg, which I did at about 5:45 AM PDT. Here’s a timeline of what happened after that.
5:45 AM
Diggs - 1
Total Page Views - 943
Total page views are cumulative starting at 12:00 AM on 14 AUG 2007.
I thought it would just be one of those articles that would slip through the fingers of the digg community and into oblivion.
10:00 AM (Lunch)
Diggs - 7
Total Page Views - 1,607
This is about the time that it was on the front page of Linux.com. I don’t think I even looked at it between when it was submitted to digg and now. The site traffic was higher than the normal rate, and I was happy to see that over a thousand people had seen my article, and that seven people clicked the digg button, but I didn’t think it would get much more attention than that. I was wrong.
2:45 PM
Diggs - 31
Total Page Views - Unknown
After noting the increase, I went to the next office over to talk to my boss for about 15 minutes. Upon returning to my desk, I checked the stats and diggs again.
3:00 PM
Diggs - 58
Total Page Views - 3,117
It was around this time that the article made the front page of digg. I went back to my boss’ office, and we watched with disbelief as the diggs started rolling in. My boss would hit the refresh button, and as soon as we saw how many diggs the story had, he’d hit it again. The rate of increase was about one or two diggs per second. We only did this for about three minutes because it was time to go home.
An Overview
From 3:00 PM until midnight, the site received 46,867 page views for a total of 49,984. The busiest period was between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, when the site received 6,489 page views. I went to bed at around 10:00 PM when the article had 602 diggs.
I have to take a minute here to plug my host, Media Temple. I use their basic hosting plan, and not once did my site slow down. I always heard that the digg effect was brutal, and wondered how Media Temple would handle it. I couldn’t be more pleased. They even offer a page that shows what parts of your site are inefficient, which actually helped me discover and fix a problem with my site.
I also need to clear something up about Wordpress. I’ve seen plenty of Wordpress sites crumble under the enormous load of a front-page-of-digg article. Use the wp-cache plugin. This site may have stayed up without it, but it prevented the usage of more system resources than were necessary. This site never slowed down, and I was able to use the administrative interface without problems the entire time.
The Next Day
I continued to receive both diggs and increased traffic on 15 AUG. I made some adjustments to my layout and removed some plugins which seemed to be inefficient, but never had any problems with the site. It seems to have handled the digg effect without incident. At 7:00 AM the article had around 800 diggs and wasn’t on the front page or the top ten list, and by 10:00 PM the article had 990 diggs and the site had received 82,864 page views for the day, with an hourly average of 3,452.67. The busiest period was between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM with 6,368 page views. The article hit the 1,000 diggs mark sometime during the night. The total page views for the day after was 89,443, almost double the page views from the day it made the front page, making the grand total for the two days 139,427.
The Following Week
Site traffic is still much higher than before being dugg. Here’s an excerpt from the Page Views report from Media Temple’s Urchin site statistics.
Sat 8/04 192 Sun 8/05 778 Mon 8/06 853 Tue 8/07 863 Wed 8/08 1163 Thu 8/09 1825 Fri 8/10 1357 Sat 8/11 299 Sun 8/12 662 Mon 8/13 2511 Tue 8/14 49984 Wed 8/15 89443 Thu 8/16 21449 Fri 8/17 17741 Sat 8/18 10917
Some Things I Learned
- Very few visitors from digg will return or become regular visitors unless you hit the front page again soon.
- Digg users probably won’t see your ads, much less click on them.
- Wordpress can, without a doubt, handle the digg effect beautifully.
- To handle the digg effect efficiently, you need the wp-cache plugin.
- You need to be hosted. That Linux computer under your desk might handle the coming storm, but your cable modem or DSL connection probably doesn’t offer enough upstream bandwidth.
Anything to add? Survived the digg effect and want to share your secrets?
Put it in the comments!
19 Comments
Great overview on what happened and we at (mt) can’t agree more with using WP cache. It’s a must for a serious blogger.
Congrats on the digg, glad we could help, and keep up the great linux-foo!
Cheers
A friend of mine who used to run DailyPuppy.com swears by MediaTemple as well.
I came to LBD via http://www.linuxhomepage.com, a pretty nice and easy Linux news agregator, which showed the Linux Today link, which lead me here.
WP-Cache is probably the best plugin ever created for WordPress. I’m amazed at how much of a difference it makes when I get a spike in traffic. It’d be nice to see a caching system integrated into the core of a future WordPress version.
There’s one more thing about the digg effect:
You got a ton of links to the post from all kinds of mighty linux sites which will help you rank better in google later. Yahoo currently shows you got 462 links to the post.
See for yourself here: http://linuxbraindump.org/2007/08/13/the-10-commandments-for-new-linux-users/
WP-Cache is a great plugin when it works. If you host your site with GoDaddy becareful as the plugin may not work correctly. Check out the Wordpress forums for details.
I swear by WP-Cache. I run a WordPress-powered site which gets 20k pageviews a day on slow days and over 100k pageviews on popular days (which usually happens once or twice a week).
Yet the box the site is on just puts along as is nothing was any different even though it’s also hosting other extremely high traffic websites as well as the vB powered forums for my site.
So yeah, I love WP + WP-Cache when it comes to high traffic.
I agree, Media Temple is by far some of the best hosting around. And you’re right on target with wp-cache.
I had a Wordpress site Slashdotted once a few years back. I wrote an article on how to crack verizon phones. It was posted on Engaget, Slashdot, and Gizmodo all on the same day. I had something around 95,000 unique visitors in 2 days, and despite all of the comments saying my site was going to go down because of the sudden traffic, it never even slowed one bit.
I did start some recent test with Digg and trying right now to make the digg effect happen) to stress test my web side. If you could be so nice and digg the following article
http://www.strongmocha.com/2007/08/29/new-vfx-movie-dragon-wars-d-war/
There is a “Share This” button you can press at the end of the article, after you pressed it select “Digg”
Thank you.
Cheers,
Thorsten
http://www.strongmocha.com
(GFX VFX DFX Compositing Travel Food)
__________________
Someone left a comment on my blog asking how to get my blog onto Digg. How DO I do that?
Content is king. Be original, and be authoritative. Try to present new information, or old information in a new light.
Agreed that WP-Cache is good and useful.
Congrats I wish I had that luck
My site fell to the Digg effect. 2,000 Diggs and 20,000 hits. I had to shut down the subdomain where Wordpress is located, because it was causing my server to crash where I have other domain. I cannot reactivate the subdomain otherwise the server will go down - so I cannot install the wp-cache plugin. Do you know of any solution? Or do I just have to wait for the users to stopping clicking.
Richard,
Once your site dies from a digg effect, the traffic should fall off rather quickly. You can probably wait a few hours… maybe a day… and then reactivate your wordpress site.
Thanks for the tip. I hosted the images on FlickR and tried to power back up the site. My server CPU usage is still maxing out, so I guess it is best to wait awhile for it to end. The Digs have gone up over 2000.
good!
good!
You should also consider multiple front-end WWW servers and backend mysql load balancing and synchronization.
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