Yesterday, an article on this very website hit the front page of Digg.com.  We didn’t expect to hit the front page of Digg so soon, but more importantly, we never expected to survive.  This website is hosted on a shared hosting platform.  If you’ve done any research, shared hosts NEVER survive the Digg Effect.  And yet, we did.  In fact, it was quite easy (and inexpensive).  There are many reasons shared servers die when an enormous amount of traffic is received in a small period of time.  In this article, I will explain this phenomenon.  Even more exciting:  we’ll teach you how to survive.

Why Shared Servers Die

The accepted rule is that a use of too much bandwidth shuts down your shared environment.  While there is a smidgen of truth to this, it is rarely the cause of server-death.  There are two true causes:

• Your host notices you are getting an enormous surge of traffic and turns off your service temporarily.  This can happen because your agreement doesn’t allow this type of traffic.  The more common reason is that your host is a bitch.  They see their precious servers being rampaged and they turn off your service, claiming that they thought you were experiencing a DDOS attack.  Did they actually think you were experiencing a DDOS attack?  Probably not.  They could have taken 15 seconds and seen that your traffic was coming from Digg.
• Ram/CPU usage.  Bandwidth is rarely a problem, even being on the front page of Digg.  But, all those people are making requests from your database and this overloads CPU and RAM usage, thus putting your site at a standstill.

How to Fix It

Luckily, these problems are easily remedied.  And, lucky for you, I’m awesome.  I’m going to tell you.  Here’s how:

Hosting Service

As I explained above, the shared environment is the cause of these problems.  When you read around on the internet, people are pretty cynical. “It is impossible to survive Digg with a shared host!  Impossible!” people proclaim.  In reality, they are spending $100 a month for a hosting service and they want to make us shared folk feel bad.

Now, they aren’t morons.  They are mostly right.  Shared hosting does suck, usually.  There are so many options out there, and they all make radical claims of unlimited usage for $5 a month or some ridiculously low fee.  They are not to be trusted.  Every single one of these companies will turn you off in the event of a massive Digging.  The solution?  Find a GOOD hosting service.  We have done this for you.

This site you are on right now is hosted on Nearly Free Speech.  We survived the front page of Digg. Yesterday.  I could go on and on about how they are the best hosting company out there, and it would all be true.  But, you can read all about that elsewhere.  We’ll just give you the basics:

• They offer a pay-as-you-go service.  It’s cheap, and you only pay for the bandwidth you use.  So, you don’t pay monthly when you have no visitors.  You only pay when you HAVE visitors.  This is a great system.  And, it’s cheap.  How much did it cost when we hit the front page of Digg yesterday?  We received about 40,000 visitors, and it cost us under $4.  FOUR DOLLARS.  Bargain basement prices.
• They get paid when you are using bandwidth, so they won’t shut you down when you hit Digg.  They are going to try and help you.
• They offer clustered hosting, with burstability. So, your site is actually spread out over many servers that can kick in when you have a lot of traffic.  This solves the CPU/Ram issue.  And remember, it works.  It worked for us.

We received about 200 comments on the digg site, and only ONE of them mentioned problems.  One person mentioned that we had bandwidth problems, so I assume the site was slow. Another commenter 1 minute later made no mention of this. So, either the first guy was lying, or our site was slow for a MOMENT while the other servers kicked in.  The bottom line is, we never went down, and only one person (out of 40,000) mentioned any slowdown. If you are using another shared hosting service, you’ve made a mistake.  Migrate.  Now.

Website

This site runs on the Joomla CMS.  Some of you may use Drupal, Wordpress, another CMS, or none at all.  All of these are ok.  There are basics that apply to all.  If you want to survive Digg, follow these methods:

• Turn off unnecessary modules.  If your site is filled with little widgets like “whos online,” “Date and Time,” “Local Temperature,” and other BS, you probably won’t make it through a good Digging. Every one of these makes calls to your database (thus using more CPU/Ram).  Turn off all unnecessary modules or extensions. This is good advice for surviving Digg, and good advice in general.  No one cares.  Extras are ugly.
• Cache.  Cache everything, in every way you can.  Cache your modules.  Cache your pages. Cache cache cache.  I can’t say this enough.  With Joomla, you must turn on caching in the Global Settings, then  also turn on the “System - Cache” plug-in to enable page caching.  This is going to make your site smaller and also make fewer calls to the database.
• Gzip Compression: I won’t explain what this is in detail, but it essentially “zips up” your website, much like Winzip would do to any files on your computer.  Results will vary depending on your CSS, template, modules, etc.  On this site, gzip compression turns a 100kb page into about a 20kb page.  This is so important I can’t even explain.  Just DO IT.

Other Things to Keep in Mind

• Keep images small.  Smaller than 5kb if you can.  If possible, host images off-site.  In terms of mass Digg visitors, 1kb less information on a page can make or break you.
• Keep templates small: Optimize them.  If your logo at the top of your screen is 70kb, every visitor will download it while visiting.  Death will ensue.  Keep it small!
• Don’t paginate: I don’t care if you want your top 10 list to be on ten pages.  Make it one long page.  First of all, Digg users hate pagination, and will most likely bury you.  Secondly, if you have 5 pages, you are basically making your visitors and bandwidth 5 times larger.  Make one long page (like this one).  No one will care, and it will save you much heartache.
• Let your hosting company know: When we got Dugg, I was out preparing for a wedding.  I had no idea I had been Dugg until it was over.  So, I never let NearlyFreeSpeech know.  And yet, they came through.  They did what they do and I was fine.  However, if you are picking up speed and you are about to hit the front page, shoot your hosting provider an email.  Let them know.  They’ll thank you.

Do You Really Want It?

We got 40,000 visitors from Digg.  How many of them clicked our ads?  27. How many of them ventured through the site beyond the popular article?  Roughly 1%. Digg is a very tech savvy crew.  Most of them have adblockers installed, and if they don’t, they will simply ignore your ads. They also tend to be a bit ADD and will spastically click on pages and never follow through. If you are trying to use Digg to make money or sell something, you are doing it wrong.  It won’t work.  I promise.  If you are trying to become the next engadget, it won’t work.  Digg will make ONE article popular, and that is about all it will do. Digg is only a useful tool if you simply want to get your stuff out there.  Make sure you want it.

To Sum Up

Here at TL;DR, we are hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.net.  We use the Joomla CMS.  We turn off all the extra goodies.  We cache and Gzip everything.  We keep our images small.  We optimize our template.  We got Dugg.  We made no money.  We survived.

And you can too.

(If you have any questions, post a comment below.  I will do my best to answer them all).