Since you have reached this page, I’m assuming that your website is hosted on a shared server and has already been a victim of digg effect (or atleast know what it means) - now you want a solution.
Its always good to share your articles on Digg, it makes sure that your voice is heard. Everything goes well until your article reaches Digg’s front page. From that point onwards your website won’t be in your control anymore, you won’t be able to open your control panel or access your files through ftp. The massive traffic coming from Digg will kill the server that has hosted your website.
If the administrator of the web server is monitoring the server there is no doubt that your account will be suspended. Even if the administrator is careless, you website won’t stay alive, there is no way that the server will be able to handle such traffic. You won’t have any other alternatives but to watch the traffic get wasted and feel helpless.
Optimizing wordpress for handling Digg traffic:
The first thing (and it is very important) you should do is, install a plug-in named wp-cache on wordpress. It simply caches your pages so that your server won’t have to execute same PHP code thousands of time per minute. To put it more simple, it changes your php files to html-like files.
Believe me, this really works, I’ve tried it and it works.
Go get it now, installing wp-cache could be a hard job, but you should not give up on this one, even if it takes 2 hours you won’t regret installing it.
Let me give you a tip though (for installing wp-cache):
- Before you activate wp-cache plugin on wordpress, login to your cpanel and open the filemanager.
(You can also use ftp) - Inside ‘/public_html’ find the directory named ‘wp-content’.
- Make sure you’ve set the permission for that directory to ‘777′, (although some might argue about security and stuff on doing this, this is your only chance of installing wp-cache without any headaches. And don’t worry about security, in a shared host environment other users will not have access to your folders anyway. If you are worried about the administrator accessing your files, you are better off buying a dedicated server, that way the whole issue won’t be an issue anymore)
- Now you can activate wp-cache, it will configure everything itself.
Link: Get the latest version of wp-cache!
Even more things that you can do:
Well these are the obvious things that you can do.
- Keep it simple, use less graphics, if you don’t want to end up with zero bandwidth remaining.
- Use less plug-ins or disable unused plug-ins (although this might not be a problem after installing wp-cache)
- You can also try disabling comments, although everyone love getting comments on their article.
- Try not to use CAPTCHAs! (For example on comment form)
- Don’t make wordpress send you an email each time you get a comment (Its just not needed).
(Disable it from ‘wp-admin/options-discussion.php‘ page, E-mail me whenever: Anyone posts a comment) - Get rid of anything that can abuse the server and has least importance.
- Use less JavaScript? Just kidding! In fact spare the server and try to do more with Java Scripts if possible.
And if nothing works?
You don’t have many options really, do one of following.
- Use blogger.com, it even lets you use your own domain name.
- Use caching services like coral cache, i.e. submit the cached page on Digg. This has some obvious disadvantages.
- If your blog earns enough money for you, its time to buy a dedicated server.
One more thing that you can do is, wait for your article to become popular, once it is popular and listed on duggmirror.com, redirect the traffic to the cached page on duggmirror.com, to know more about duggmirror, visit their site.
How to redirect?
- Using .htaccess file on your server. (Using Redirectmatch command). This is only possible if you can still access the server thorough cpanel or ftp, which is very unlikely.
- Using http://everydns.net/ visit the site for more info.
Don’t feel shy to add your techniques below, through comment.
Man, I can’t believe the comments above me… [The comment was deleted by administrator]
Anyways, good article. I think that having a good server is critical to surviving the digg effect. Sadly for those of us who are internation, I also think that hosting your Site in the US is very important for this kind of thing. US hosting is crazy cheap, which will bring things down, but also most traffic will come from the US. If you can’t afford a dedicated server then a VPS is definatly the next best option. Because you are capped as to how much resources you can use. This means your website will not bring the whole server down.