AnthonysBlog.Net Anthony's Blog

Slashdot Fark Digg or just Popular

Most of us who have a website, or a blog, or have been online for some time knows the names Fark, Slashdot, and Digg; and with having a site we all would love it if our site was listed at any of these sites. When being listed on these sites your site will instantly become popular and you will know the ups and downs of being popular.

Some items that you will experience are listed below.

• Huge inbound surge in traffic.
• Huge surge means you will burn up your allotted bandwidth with your hosting provider
• The server your site is on can crash if it is not configured correctly
• If the server is configured correctly the site can still crash because of poor code
• Your AdSense account will grow
• You will get to say you have been /.'d Farked, or Dugg

Again those are just some of the items that will happen, there are many others good and bad but you get the idea.

As you know I run a growing hosting company that has seen its share of busy and really busy sites. However in the 3+ years of doing this we have only had one site get Dugg, and I am sorry but the stats were lost a few years ago when there was a huge hardware crash, that also crapped up the backups. However we have experienced several just popular sites.

This first site is not that popular, but this customer has appeared on several different nationwide radio shows giving away his book for free via pdf on his site.

As you can see from the picture below, the site averages 40,000+ hits a day, and the day before the show they started advertising there upcoming speaker and the traffic jumped to 160,000+ hits. Now on the day of the show the site jumped to 1.8 Million + hits. I must say that is a ton of hits coming from a radio broadcast.
Some numbers for you:

• 1,856,354 Hits That One Day
• 77,348 Hits a Hour
• 1289.134 Hits a Minute
• 21.48 Hits a Second

So as you can see this was from a radio show, but still not the above listed "site killers," or is it just as big or bigger?

Next Example:
This to me is just a popular site, this site boosts to me some nice numbers. Now this site is just popular and honestly nothing more.
Here are some numbers.

• 947,718 Hits a Day
• 39,488.25 Hits a Hour
• 658.13 Hits a Minute
• 10.9 Hits a Second

Now that is not a bad amount of traffic, now looking at the below image, you can see that this account pulls these numbers in daily, not just in spikes.

The above two examples are customers of ours, on our shared servers, they are not dedicated server customers.

Now the following three graphs are from one of our dedicate customers server, this server is capped at 10Mbit/Sec to help keep costs for them down. As you can see this site is maxed out almost 24/7 serving up data.

Daily Bandwidth Usage:

Weekly Bandwidth Usage:

Monthly Bandwidth Usage:

I personally think that the site above is pretty darn popular do you?

The first example was followed a few days later by another customer, a small customer Linux Distribution was featured at DistroWatch.com as the next best thing, well the following graph shows that nice little bandwidth surge. Interesting enough, the site generated a lot of hits, but being a 700MB iso download, the bandwidth usage went through the roof. The spike slowed down as we mirrored the iso on to 4 other servers to help reduce the load.

So as you can see, by some of the above examples, the above listed Site Killers are pretty darn cool, and I would like to see what happens being featured on one of them, but at the same time, your site can just be popular and done right a shared server can and will handle the load.