This great advice. I haven’t had anything of mine make it to the home page of Digg, but you never know.

I’ve actually seen a WordPress plug-in that does some sort of caching so that pages are not built dynamically for every request, but the set up seemed like too much trouble. Of course, like those in the US who fail to get health insurance, I may regret not looking in to the plug-in further.

Great advice!
And this deservs to be bookmarked:).

Yep great advice…. I doubt I’ll ever have that problem but I’m gonna keep this info handy just in case…

Thanks for sharing…

I always enjoy my time here. Thanks.

I’ve had several sites dugg before, and I’ve never had to do any of the things you’re suggesting. All you need is a good host and smart code. Pair and TextDrive both host sites of ours in a shared hosting environment that have been dugg, and all of the sites were running PHP and had dynamic data from a MySQL database. If the code is horribly inefficient and the hosting provider is sub-par, then yes, you better do what you suggested, otherwise you’re going down.

There’s a dialogue from a play that goes: “Can you dig it? I knew you could.” I have to try to find the play.

Anyway, I dig your good advice!

Come back to ABW — your posts always add sizzle

WP-Cache will make a cache of recently requested pages and you could tweak it so that it will maintain the cache for some time (handy if you are being dugg at that moment), and set-up is really easy. Really easy. It’s useful even if you have low traffic because it speeds things up just flicking between pages; as long as you don’t NEED gzip all the time, I’d say go with it. It only stops the loop from running all the time, of course–there is still http requesting and rendering to be done.

I’ve submitted this story to digg. Hopefully your site will hold up, aha.

Great advice. I hadn’t thought about notifying my ISP. I will be writing their number down in my wallet in case I can’t get on to the admin page…
Thanks
Jambell

I have had a couple popular ones. No where near the 1000 diggs, But even a hundred or so had me paying more for my limited bandwidth. The site got nuked a couple of times. Though, I made no revenue I did manage to get on Del.icio.us.

I still get great traffic from one of my articles that made it to the front page of digg.

I think Wordpress already has built-in caching, but maybe we need a plugin that can generate a static version of the site. Remember MT?

If the page that is already linked to on Digg is dynamic – the best hope may be to place a link to redirect to a static URL… ASAP…

Because Digg users will report a flaw in the blink of an eye, and Digg’s software automatically Kills the Link submission after a certain amount of reports.

And some members have several accounts so one report can bloom into several depending on who is reporting it

But this is a bitter-sweat tactic – because – Google spiders Digg’s homepage voraciously, so in essence you have lost the value of a great Back link that would have helped your page on the SERPs – long after it has ceased being Digged

Excellent write up.

Great article – wish I had this problem

WoW and I was just going to submit my site to digg. I need to work on lowering the size of my homepage then ^^.

Great advice indeed. And if you’re more tech-savvy or have a geek friend, ask (probably) him to implement a very basic caching (pre-parsing to HTML if nothing is changed, or in heavy traffic make it half a minute or so..) there are a lots of tutorials on this and for blog engines you can find suitable plugins.

And of course, write/make/present/do something in order to be digged

Great article! You are #8 on the front page right now! I hope you follow your own advice.

If you have the cash, simply invest on a better server like a Pentium D 940 2GB RAM. Such server config can suvive any types of digg.

I don’t worry too much about my site to go down, even if it is shared between 400 users. I guess one should always been cautious, but I’m pretty confident when it comes to my site being dugg. I’ve been dugg once, which gave about 5000 uniques in 24 hours, showing no trace of server stress within that time. Then again, I use quick loading layouts, and custom dynamic pages for quick loading. (How many sites load in 2 seconds on 56kb dailup?)

I’ve always wondered if it is really worth it to put my css in a separate stylesheet. It’s an extra request, but it gets catched by the visitor.

I never thought of contacting my host when something like this could, or is happening. It’s smart. I’m glad I read this article. Thanks.

Your tutorial is now dugged LOL

This is why I have my blog hosted by blogger.com, I worry about blogging, and getting my blog linked, and blogger.com worries about the traffic, they do what they do best, and I do what I do best. And best of all, blogger.com is FREE!!!

>>This is why I have my blog hosted by blogger.com

Good idea; as long as you use your own URL so you don’t ever worry about losing the site and incoming links.

The Free/Open Source (GNU GPL) program dijjer can also help distribute the bandwidth:

http://dijjer.org/

You’ll have to setup your site to use dijjer, and people would also need to install it. It’s like automatic bittorent for http/html.

Good hints, but what if your website requires dynamicly generated pages? My website is sort of social network / community site. How do I know if I have enough juice to handle the dynamiclly generated traffic?

>>what if your website requires dynamicly generated pages?

Usually all that will matter is the landing page. Make sure the traffic goes to a static page; having a home page that does not require database access would be generally beneficial for almost any site.

One way to do this is to write out datafiles to the web server every few minutes or when certain things update. So when someone makes a new post or creates a new profile, the DB writes out a datafile into the file system (ie, by serializing an array of items). The web server uses that datafile to pullinfo to the home page so that the database server is not needed. This sort of data delay is common and lets your home page get hit incessantly without causing undue load.

 what if your website requires dynamicly generated pages?

Then you use this tutorial instead.  I’ve survived three FP diggs and kept the site dynamic the entire time with this method.

Great advices thanks!
looks like digg users love your site

It would be nice to have pages written in HTML, however if you have thousands and millions of pages, it would be difficult to keep track of HTML pages, and especially if you require the template every now and then. Dynamic pages are, of course, the only way to go. Furthermore, I do not see Digg having much problem with dynamic pages.

These are nice tips. Found more related information on how to survive slashdotting, which might interest others.

Developing with RubyonRails allows you to set static comment as a feature of the framework. It’s as easy as specifying which parts of the page you want as static or dynamic.

Really interesting food for thought here.

This is great advice. I wished I had read it before I was dugg! I couldn’t survive being dugg at Tetsou when my article ‘ 7 deadly sins of email’ was posted. And this was the first of my articles to have been posted. Within hours I had floods of traffic hitting my page which is dynamically served by PHP.

As the server slowed, my provider notified me I was under a DOS attack! Ha ha. I explained about the Digg article and we tried to shore the server – but to no avail as my articel quickly hit the frontpage.

Be careful what you digg for.

Tetsou

I think Wordpress already has built-in caching, but maybe we need a plugin that can generate a static version of the site. Remember MT?

The build-in caching is disabled by default and isn’t a proper output cache… it’s just used for caching of frequently used PHP objects, like user, page, and category information. If you want to survive the Digg effect with WordPress, you need the WP-Cache2 plugin, which caches the HTML output of pages. I’ve pushed sites to well over 1200 page views per second with this, and other tweaks, using WordPress. Digg and Slashdot together at the same time aren’t even going to come close to hitting that.

Or, if you run Apache, you can prepare your site to automatically redirect visitors coming from Digg, Slashdot etc. to go through Coral Cache:
http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/1957

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