Digg Can Do So Much Damage Through Front Page Traffic?

Read this post by Google engineer, Matt Cutts, YouTube Read Comment Aloud Feature. People found this post so interesting that they showered Diggs on it. Within some time, it got 4000 Diggs and hit the front page as a popular post (Digg it again if you wish, I did). It gives me some ideas as to the effect of hitting the Digg front page. Those Diggs sent such enormous traffic to Mr Matt Cutts’s blog that his hosting was affected, and the site was down for a few hours. In that picture is Matt’s cat, Ozzie, wondering about the traffic!

Though Matt calls this post a ‘throwaway post’, we know the value of the post so as to Digg it.

He had his blog running without caching turned on. That was the main cause of the failure. If he had the caching, he could have managed some of the users through that, and the site wouldn’t have gone down.

I have only a remote idea of what Digg front page can do to you, as I never hit it. I read that it can send you a whole month’s traffic within some hours’ time. If you are not prepared for that kind of traffic, it will bring your site down to its knees. While normal traffic is a piece of cake, Digg traffic is a ton of cake! Digg front page means traffic in the order of about 50,000 visitors on a single day. Can you imagine? Anyway, Mr Cutts got his blog right, now.

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