Left Lane
Life, web, and caffeine. By Pat Collins.
My Slashdot Effect
Published January 25th, 2006While helping a fellow designer out with web bandwidth by helping him mirror his site, I experienced what many call the Slashdot effect on my Burned Media site. For the unintroduced, the Slashdot effect occurs when the tech news site Slashdot links to a given web site, whereupon thousands upon thousands of tech enthusiants hit said site, causing a great bit of traffic in a short amount of time. It is this effect that can bring poorly maintained web servers to their knees and can truly determine the stamina of a web site in its busiest times.
It’s a good thing I hooked myself up with Media Temple. With the basic plan I get 30 GB of monthly bandwidth. The site is a soft launch, so not too much daily traffic was being generated before last Thursday and I had bandwidth to spare. To give you a better idea of how that pattern changed:
With image-intensive content being served, I was biting my nails watching my bandwidth usage creep closer and closer to the 30 GB limit. All in all, the server served 19 GB of content in the matter of a few hours without blinking an eye. On a shared server no less.
Neat.
Posted in Web, Burned Media.
LOL. yeah that’s catch 22… you want traffic but not THAT much traffic. I remember early last year my site was featured on cssvault and I had to make special arangements with my host to up my bandwidth.
This almost makes me want to be on slashdot or on digg just to see if my hosts would sustain the load. LoL Now, if only I could write something interesting enough to be featured there…
Any curious patterns in your statistics?
Those shared servers can take a lot! Mine took 15.7k uniques in a day once - but it was around then that I started breaking 30GB of bandwidth per month so I upgraded. I’m on a (dv) extreme now and it’s insane.
Paul - I’m working on getting a (dv) of my own.
Yum.
Yeah… I’m going to have to disagree with this. Ah… I think my personal server in my apartment can handle any load.
Recently, my site got linked to from Boing Boing, USA Today, was big on Digg, and was on Rocketboom to name a few; holy hell did the bandwith shoot through the roof.
I can see why. Very nice site. Haha, I love the orange rind helmet for the cat!