After uploading the post titled “Gasoline Prices: Why $2.189 and not $2.19; Why The Third Decimal Place?” on late Thursday night, I tried to check my website yesterday around noon and kept getting error messages. I was just about to lodge a complaint with Dreamhost when I read this email from Dreamhost Tech Support:
I’m writing to let you know that your domain thetaoofmakingmoney.com was
getting too many hits and consequently kept crashing the shared apache
service. I set a restriction on the domain: it can receive 75 connections
in 5 seconds which resets every 5 seconds. This is to bring down the load
on your server, but still leave your site operational.
From the Sitemeter referral page it was obvious that one of my post got on Digg.com. Here is a screenshot of what happened at Digg.com - 930 diggs so far !:
If you want to add to those numbers - Digg here 
…also you could entertain yourself with some nasty comments on that digg link.
And here are my Sitemeter statistics showing the digg-ing blip that goes near 13,000 !!
Seems like I really need to stop being a moron and read something about how to make websites survive the Digg assault by caching and staticizing. I do run WP-cache 2.0 plugin, but apparently that didn’t help much and the crashing continued on and off.
I am still wondering about what attracted so many diggs to this particular article…certainly there have been better articles in the past on this blog.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Golb Guru,
WOW!! Congratulations.
Looks like you wrote about a topic that struck a nerve with Digg readers. There were sure alot of comments (rounding, marketing, historical etc.) about your post.
Betcha your Alexa ranking will get a nice boost too.
It will be interesting to see if how many of these readers will return to your site to read future posts.
Happy New Years!
Jon
mr golbguru, congrats!!
super saver, jersey jen: thanks
..its just an abnormal spike and I think traffic will return back to normal in a few days.
jon: you are damn right…honestly, I dont expect any of them to come back
Congrats on the digg. Always exciting when that happens. If the topic makes it to the front page, it always means 1000s of hits to your blog. While most of them won’t return (digg readers are just that way) it usually means that other blogs will link to the article and can give some good backlinks. It’s a nice thing to happen. Keep up the good work.
quality is a guarantor for traffic. Congrats!
“I am still wondering about what attracted so many diggs to this particular article…certainly there have been better articles in the past on this blog.”
That is a good question. You never know for sure with Digg or Reddit what will attract the audience. From my experience, Gadgets, Apple, Gaming, and Digital Imaging are just a few things.
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