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.