High Traffic- A Love/Hate Relationship
Yesterday I had my first experience with the “Digg Effect.” Early in the day my post about “How to Find Cheap Plane Tickets” made it to the front page of Reddit.com (It was as high as #4 at one point.) My site was running a little slowly, but managing. At some point in the evening (when I was in class, of course); my site went down.
When I got home from class I was checking my website and noticed that it was no longer running. I contacted my host and they informed me that they “took it down for abuse of resources.” Obviously I was extremely upset that they took it down without informing me, but at the time I was more concerned about getting it up and running again. I wondered where the sudden surge of traffic came from and quickly found out that I wound up on the front page of Digg.com sometime early last night. Of course, this is what every blogger loves and hates: a surge of new visitors, but a hosting company that can’t handle it. (Now, I thought I had systems in place for dealing with this—I had installed wp-cache, but apparently hadn’t activated it properly. Even when I did, my hosting company told me that it still wasn’t ok with the amount of traffic.) So, I set up a very very poor looking site at googlepages and redirected all the traffic from the Plane Tickets post to that site. Even though I wasn’t pleased, I left it for the evening and set up another static page this morning (which is what you will see as of the moment.)
I’m still getting a huge amount of traffic (compared to normal). I’m trying to work with my hosting company to see what they can do for me, but unfortunately they only offer email support (though I’ve pleaded and pleaded to speak with someone on the phone). So, as of today, my site will most likely be running more slowly than normal. Please bear with me in this. I will still get the next post in the series about cheap travel up by the middle of the day.
Please send me an email (moneyfortherestofus [at] gmail [.] com) or post a comment if you have any advice about working with hosting companies/finding new ones. Thanks!