It turns out this recipe for Thai Spicy Noodles got tagged by a social networking site called Digg late last week.  My  quiet little site that usually gets maybe a dozen visitors a day all of a sudden was getting hundreds of hits a minute, all of them looking for the same page.  As you may have noticed, it didn’t handle the load well.

Amusingly, I used to worry about this on previous incarnations of this web site.  In the tech world, it’s known as the Slashdot effect.  It never happened, and I don’t do much tech blogging anymore, so when I moved to Bluehost and this new version of WordPress, my blogging software, I didn’t bother to plan for it.

The first I heard about the Digg link was when I started getting a bunch of comment spam.  I have the site set up so that any comments by new readers are forwarded to me for approval before they show up.  There’s a set of bottom feeders out there in the web world that tries to drive traffic to their sites, or increase their standing in the search engines, by putting a comment on sites like mine to link back to their site.  Then when the search engines spider my site, they see a link back to the bad guy’s site and elevate his page ranking because they believe it to be more popular than it is, due to the many sites that “link” to it.  This is apparently like spam; it’s automated and works just often enough that they keep trying.

But I digress.  When I discovered what had happened, I tried to get into my site’s control panel to mitigate the damage.  Unfortunately, the site was so busy I couldn’t get in.  So I figured I’d drop a polite note to the admins at Digg and ask them to delete the link, or at least point it to the Google cache of it rather than my live (dead?) site.  Hah.  Four days later I got back a snotty email, to the effect of “if you don’t want it linked to, don’t put it on the web.”  Aside from the tone, fair enough.

My next plan was to log onto my domain registrar and redirect the frankh.com domain to somewhere else that could handle the traffic.  (The traffic was coming to frankh.com, one of the domain names I own, which points to my master site here at hicinbothem.com.)  After a few hours, that worked well enough that I could finally get into the site and optimize the page by removing the pictures and the links from the post and front page.  That worked well enough that the site at least stayed up under the onslaught of visitors.  By Monday, the river of visitors had slowed to a trickle and I put everything back the way it was.  No major harm done, except that I somehow lost the noodle picture…. I suspect I deleted it accidentally when I was trying to remove it from the post.

The whole debacle was definitely a learning experience.  What I discovered:

1. The total number of visitors was just under 50,000 over four days.  At an average page load of 25kbytes, they ate up just over a gigabyte of bandwidth.  Fortunately Bluehost has a liberal bandwidth policy.
2. This points out a deficiency: my site layout is horribly inefficient.  It also appears that WordPress does absolutely nothing out of the box to optimize the site layout.  I need to do some more research, but this is apparently a known issue and there are several workarounds for it.  Unfortunately, I had to do a good bit of Googling and searching to find that out.  I’m not blaming anyone– I love WordPress and will continue to use it– but it might be good if they made prominent mention of this in the documentation.
3. Digg users are not the kind of users I am looking for.  50,000 visitors and none of them left a comment that I was willing to approve.  Am I being elitist?  Perhaps, but a recipe for spicy noodles shouldn’t have comments discussing the sexual attributes of the women of Thailand.  With half the words misspelled, naturally.  I agree, Thai women are great, but I don’t choose to discuss that here.  Use the Digg forum.  Everybody else did.
4. Digg users don’t follow links.  They came for the noodles and left.  Oddly, many of them appear to have left within seconds of arriving, which implies they didn’t even read what they came to see.  I haven’t figured that out yet.
5. There are about 88 million different social bookmarking sites on the web, and no mere human can keep track of them all.  I had no idea of the scope of those sites until I did a little Googling.  I use a couple of them, but the sheer number of them that exist, and the volumes of users they have, are incredible.  Doesn’t anybody do anything but surf the web anymore?
6. I need to get on board with some kind of low-key advertising, ala Google Adsense or something similar.  At least some good would come of a massive influx of visitors.

So that’s the story of my first adventure into high-volume web services.  There will be some changes to the site over the next week because of what I’ve learned.  And hey, try the noodle recipe, it’s really good.