Well . . . I had heard about having other people’s servers get overwhelmed by Digg.com, but it hadn’t before happened to us. Until today.
Last night, I had put up a post about a psychology site that let’s you “average” faces, resulting in incredible attractive (mathematically generated) faces of men or women. Really fascinating (and fun). I naively titled the post: “I created a woman so beautiful she made me melt.” Which was true, as you’ll (someday) be able to see . . .
I sent the post to Reddit.com and digg.com. We received higher than average traffice all day (many more than 12,000 unique visitors today so far), but then our site froze up. It’s hard to tell at this point, but it appears that the Digg folks came over in unbelievable numbers–so overwhelming that this site was brought almost to a standstill. I was eventually able to get back in and convert the post to an (unviewable) “draft,” where I’ll keep it until things calm down.
To avoid this problem in the future, Nick Smith, our designer (nicksmithdesign.com) advises that I will need to incur serious monthly charges for the next higher level of hosting. Hmmm.
If you can get through to read this, that’s what’s been going on today. If you visited us today, but couldn’t navigate the site briskly, please give us a few hours. We hope to be back to normal. Interesting stuff, the Internet.
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