Getting Dugg Quick Fix

[ Digg this! ] I was just chatting with Andrew of Alleba over YM while helping him deal with his blog being dugg.

So here lies the problem:

His sites are hosted on DreamHost, one of the more popular hosting providers around. When he found out that his post way back in September about creating a Web 2.0 logo Photoshop tutorial got dugg and was about to hit the frontpage, he immediately informed DH about it and they in fact responded that they will monitor the site’s activity. Fast forward this evening, the post went to the front page of Digg getting around 1,000 diggs at the moment and tons and tons of traffic. The tragic thing was, despite the warning, his site still went down.

Ok, so done is done, DH isn’t still answering his cry for help. What to do? What to do?

Here are some steps, assuming you are running on a database driven WordPress blog, I thought would help solve the problem:

Login to your Control Panel and disable the dugg page. You can do this by renaming the file or the post slug. If you can’t do that, try disabling read permissions to the page or the folder/directory it is on. This will give you some time to prepare for the switch to a static HTML version. Disabling the page will prevent your site from going down if the exponential flow of traffic from Digg still continues.
Create a flat HTML file out of your dugg page. You can do a quick Save As HTML in your browser if you want the shortcut version (get a copy of it from DuggMirror when needed). Name it accordingly and upload it to your site. If you can’t access your FTP when your site is down,you can use another existing site you own, hosted somewhere else.
In your .htaccess, create a rewrite rule to redirect the old URL to the new one. The format looks like this: RedirectMatch oldURL newURL. Re-enable the orginal page or protected folder. The clicks from Digg should be properly re-directed to the static HTML version. The server should be able to handle this traffic now (note: Apache can handle a thousand times more requests than mySQL).
But what if you can’t do anything since your site is down — no admin panel, no ftp, no nothing? What you can do is re-point your domain to a new account or a new server. This will offload the traffic from your existing account as all they will get is page not found.
Create a new account on another server. (Assuming you have access to one or have a friend who can share his hosting account with you.) Re-point the domain to that new server by changing the nameservers.
Create a single HTML file with the exact copy of the Dugg page. Edit your .htaccess so that all incoming traffic is redirected to this page.
Since majority of Digg’s traffic is from the US, domain re-propagation on that side of the Internet should be fast. My experience is within 5 minutes. Traffic should be trickling in shortly.
Once that’s done, your original account should be free from the overload. You can go back and do bullet #1 and re-point the domain again.

Hope this helps.

This one suggestion is for everyone and I can’t stop repeating this : Always, always notify your hosting provider if you are expecting a huge volume of traffic on your account. They could suspend your account to prevent the rest of the sites on the shared server from going down as well (preventive measures). You provider will also be able to prepare for this and maybe even help you along the way.

Unless you’re on a dedicated server hosting your own single domain account, don’t always blame your provider that your site went down most of the day and you lost tons of traffic because you didn’t inform them ahead of time. Even gargantuan web hosts like DreamHosts and Media Temple are prone to Digg/Slashdot effects. Yup, despite MT’s claim that their grid server (gs) is impervious to such tsunamis, I personally witnessed one blog hosted by MT suffer from this.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

15 Comments

Home Page says:

12 years ago

After I originally commented I seem to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox
and from now on every time a comment is added I get four emails
with the same comment. Perhaps there is a means you are able to remove me from that service?
Many thanks!
- Reply
Miguel says:

18 years ago

Nice, what site are you hosting on EC2?

I would like to try that if and when I need a “dedicated” server. Interesting because they use Xen, the same technology I’m hacking on at work.
- Reply
Berlin says:

18 years ago

Media Temple is having trouble keeping up with the demand. So I opened an EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud ) and S3 acount with Amazon. Imagine using Amazon.com’s unused bandwidth and servers on their $10 Billion facility. You can scale up or down by adding instances of your site. Each “Instance” of your site gives you another (1.7Ghz x86, 1.75GB of RAM, 250Mb/s bandwidth) of power. You can have hundreds of instances in seconds, not hours or days, and your site mirrored throughout the U.S. I think this is the future of webhosting.
- Reply
Miguel says:

18 years ago

Bring on the links!

About GridServer: Given what I’ve seen of their architecture, I think the MySQL engine or connections to it will fail first.
- Reply
Abe Olandres says:

18 years ago

@ Migs

Its a splog alright but the Digg links back to me. Marc once mentioned as long is they splog the snippets and not the whole post, it’s ok. A backlink is a backlink. :D
- Reply
Andrew says:

18 years ago

I looked around and some say Media Temple’s Grid Server is overhyped. There was one site that signed up with them and immediately got a lot of traffic. When they complained that their site was down, Media Temple just told them to get a dedicated server. The lesson is, shared hosting sucks for high-traffic sites but is tolerated because it’s cheap. Dedicated servers can definitely do the job, but not many can afford it.
- Reply
SELaplana says:

18 years ago

so that’s how the ploghost manage their clients sites…

pero, pano kaya madugg ang mga posts ko? I want my pages to be dugg pero ang problem my post ay hindi quality kaya ang ginawa ko dinidigg ko na lang ang mga posts ni Yuga :-)
- Reply
Miguel says:

18 years ago

Hey. Trackback #7 is a digg splogger!

I thought of digging this story but he already digged it.

I made the mistake of digging, but when I checked the summary I found it came from the splog. So I buried it.
- Reply
Miguel says:

18 years ago

What I’ve seen with Media Temple so far is that their MySQL engine seems slow at times. I’m not yet sure, it could be my Internet connection that slows down WordPress.

Scaling MySQL is really tricky.

kutitots is right, why not ploghost!
- Reply
noel says:

18 years ago

nice tip! problem ko na lang is how to get Dugg! :-)
- Reply
kutitots says:

18 years ago

bat di nalang kayo sa ploghost? :D naks! hehehe
- Reply
Andrew says:

18 years ago

Yeah, I’m planning to move one of my sites to Media Temple by next month. Dreamhost is just awful.
- Reply
Andrew says:

18 years ago

Abe… Thanks for all your help!!
- Reply

tarot gratis on line says:

10 years ago

Hi there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it is really informative.
I’m going to watch out for brussels. I will be grateful if you continue this
in future. A lot of people will be benefited from your writing.

Cheers!

Miguel says:

18 years ago

19,416 views!

If you get dugg and I’m still testing Media Temple Grid Server, give me a shout. I’d like to see how they scale.
- Reply