Web Hosting for Surviving the Digg effect

By Web Hosting on Nov 2, 2007 in Hostgator Blog, Hosts, Technology, Web Hosting

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Web Hosting for Surviving the Digg effect

One of hardest things for webmasters to do is to attract visitors to their site. Much of the time this is far more difficult than the technical details of building the site. One of the fastest ways of getting a mass quantity of traffic is by writing good content and submitting it to sites like Digg, stumbleupon, reddit, or other social bookmarking site. If your story gets “Dugg” enough to be on the homepage of Digg, you could be looking at hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site. This may sound like a Goldmine to many webmasters but depending on the hosting solution you are using and if your site is using advanced features like PHP/MYSQL, it may be a case of too many visitors.

If your saying to yourself “but I have 300GB space and 3TB bandwidth on my $5.99/month hosting plan, how can this be too many visitors?”, you need a good lesson about website service resource usage, hosting company TOS agreements in fine print, and some advice on how to survive the Digg effect.

First, the “too many visitors” effect is hardly ever the cause of the problem because of space and bandwidth constraints. A normal overselling plan(where hosts sell more than they actually have and bank on users not using all of it) has enough bandwidth to handle millions, if not tens of millions of unique visitors per month. The reason why your website would get suspended because of the “Digg effect” is because of CPU/RAM overage uses. If you just run a static html site, then most likely you will not run into these problems as static HTML takes almost no CPU/RAM power to load. However, if you, like most of everyone else, are running an application such as joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, or other database application, then you will most likely be suspended by your shared hosting provider if you make the front page of Digg unless you have made prior arrangements with your web hosting company.

Most web hosts have hundreds if not thousands of shared accounts per server and they cannot let any one account take up more than a few percent of the CPU/RAM usage. Since there is usually no virtualization in a massive shared environment and therefore no real way to control how much CPU/RAM each site gets to use, one site that gets “Dugg” and gets tens of thousands of visitors per hour could possibly bring down the whole server. Since a shared provider’s goal is usually to serve the maximum number of people possible, it makes the most sense for them to suspend your account rather than risk losing all other customers on that server. Therefore, if you know your site will be “Dugg” in the near future, you should either move off of shared hosting or make special arrangements with your host on that day.

If you should choose the option to move off of shared hosting and go to a hosting solution that is more suited should your site be dugg, I would suggest the following solutions:

  1. Clustered shared hosting – Clustered shared hosting is different than regular shared hosting in the fact that you are running on many servers instead of one server. While this cluster is still shared by hundreds or thousands of accounts, it allows for more flexibility than a regular shared account. With the combined processing power of many servers, it is much less likely that one account will use up a huge portion of the total CPU/RAM resources of the cluster. While this will not guarantee that your account will not be suspended, it does greatly increase the probability that you will survive the “Digg” effect. Places that offer shared clustered hosting are mediatemple.com and Mosso.com .
  2. VPS(Virtual Private Server) – In a Virtual private server, you are still sharing the server with other people. However, a VPS provider uses virtualization software to piece off the shared server so you are guaranteed a certain amount of CPU/RAM usage all the time. You also cannot go over a certain “burst” limit, therefore ensuring service and uptime to the other users of the server. Your account will not be suspended for over usage but if you have a VPS plan that is short on CPU and RAM amounts, your site will most likely slow to a crawl during peak usage hours. After the peak hours, your account should go back to functioning as normal.
  3. Dedicated – If your site is the kind that has stories that are constantly being “Dugg”, then a dedicated server is most likely what you need. With a dedicated, you get the server completely to yourself. Be sure to get a dedicated with a least 512 RAM(1 GB preferred) and a dual-core processor if you want to ensure surviving the “Digg” effect.

Besides buying a hosting plan that guarantees more space and bandwidth resources, there are things you can do to optimize your site for heavy SQL usage. First, you can install or try to get your host to install things like Zend optimizer which helps the efficiency of many scripts. Second, you can install as few plugins(or add-ons) for scripts like Joomla or Wordpress as possible that are not written by the script creators themselves. Many times these third party add-ons are written by beginners and cause heavy SQL usage problems. An example would be the Joomla statistics add-on. By using optimization software and not installing add-ons, you will greatly reduce the chances of a server crash.Now that we have discussed how to survive the Digg effect, you may be wondering about other similar effects like if you get heavily stumbled or if your site gets featured on Reddit. These effects are very similar to what happens if your site gets “Dugg”, only to a lesser degree. Where Digg can provide as many as 100,000 visitors to your site in a day, places like Stumble or Reddit will usually provide your site with around 10,000 visits a day or maybe 2,000 or so extra an hour at its peak. While this will cause major oversellers like IX webhosting and Powweb trouble, there are many shared hosts that can handle this kind of load. If your site is not getting “Dugg” but getting “stumbled” or “reddit’ed” instead, you may not have to change over to a clustered, VPS, or dedicated solution. Rather, find a host with good tech support such as hostgator and does not horribly oversell. Look to pay in the $1/Gigabyte of transfer range for application hosting and you should not have a problem surviving a “stumble” or “reddit”.

Whether its Digg, Stumble, or Reddit, you need to make sure that you have the right hosting plan to handle an increased traffic rate during that period of time. Make sure you have quality hosting that won’t shut you down on a moment’s notice and have expansion options if your resources are being pushed to their limit. Do this will ensure a successful promotion or advertising campaign for your website or business.

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