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Baby, can you Digg your man?

(Bonus points for getting the titular reference!)

This was an interesting week for Techpedia. After a few months of hobbling around with a few hundred hits a day from internet acquaintances, the site suddenly generated some content that had more widely spread appeal.

Some pictures of Apple OS Leopard, from the Developers DVD distributed at WWDC, were posted. Intially, the response was quiet…Monday night/Tuesday we had about 4000 hits (hits = unique IPs in this case).

The article was submitted to Digg, but the traffic stayed about the same.

Then on Wednesday, the link started getting passed around on various forums, boards and via email. Wednesday we somehow pulled in 17,000+ hits. Pretty exciting stuff, and we were pleased to see that the site was staying up. A little slow on some of the larger images, but hanging in there pretty good.

Sometime during the night/early morning of Thursday though, the Digg link was resurrected from the dead, and we went from 30 Diggs to 500+ by noon, EST. Hit wise, we were at around 9,000.

By 2pm EST, the site was struggling to stay up, and we were at around 12,000 hits. Pages weren’t loading completely, and within an hour the site was dead for all intents and purposes.

We sent some panicky emails to our host (Dreamhost) and explained the situation. While they struggled to keep the server up under the assault, we put together a static page with the images and disabled the site you are currently viewing, which is driven by Wordpress and consumes many mysql cycles everytime a page loads.

By around 6pm, we had the site fairly normalized with the static page and were able to serve the content people came for. We ended the day with 18,163 unique visitors…I would guess that in the 4-6 hours of ‘downtime’, we lost about 5-8,000 hits, sadly.

Today, Friday, the traffic kept up pretty well. By noon today we were already at 10,000 hits, but watching the access log, it was easy to see that the traffic was dying down considerably. When we saw that we were up only 4,000 hits from noon until 6pm, we decided that the rush was pretty much over and we’ve decided to bring back the full site, which you are seeing now.

Overall, the Digg effect was pretty drastic. I will reveal to you that we had some 40+ comments submitted, about a dozen emails, and our Adsense pageviews for the three day period were around 110k, with right under a 100 clicks. (Can’t be more specific, sorry.)

I will also tell you that during the three day period, we transferred right at 31gb of data. That’s a lot of pictures and poorly written commentary, folks.

What have we learned from this experience?

Well, for one, we have enabled a Wordpress plugin called ‘wp-cache‘ that will aid in the distribution of heavily viewed content in the future. This was suggested by the tech, Brad, at our host. It’s currently enabled, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see it seems to be working well so far.

We also learned that Digg users hit hard, hit fast and (contrary to popular opinion), DO comment on articles and click ads/links. Sure, we’re not going to be rich from this episode, but we’ll be able to have a nice dinner and maybe a cup of Starbucks…

We want to thank all of you who visited, and also to thank our host for doing a great job keeping the site up and running. Thanks for your patronage, patience and for your kind words. We hope you find the site interesting enough to visit again. We’ll see though, won’t we?

PS: Please don’t Digg this story.
:)

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