I had only read about the SlashDot Effect, popularly known as Slashdotted. I had never experienced it first hand. While I was away in Los Angeles, this story about the Linksys gateway, which did the rounds in the blogsphere via Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing , Broadband Reports and a couple of other sites, was picked up by SlashDot. (Broke the Blogdex top 50 for the first time as well.) I had no idea that my innocuous little post could stir up such reaction. Oh well … power of the Internet first hand.
Next thing I know (rather I did not know) the traffic to the website went crazy, and quickly site was “off the air.” Apparently, the number of hits to the page created log files which tipped me over the available disk space on the server, and the index page became unavailable. Well managed to fix this problem, but it is becoming increasingly evident that it is time to go for a higher end web hosting company. Which is a problem because that is going to cost money, and well given that GigaOM is more of a hobby, I am wondering out aloud about what to do next. Suggestions and ideas are always welcome.
Not sure who you are with now, but you should check out Pair Networks –
The service is excellent and the pricing seems very fair.
I agree with Jonathan, Pair knows what they are doing. I started to be impressed by them when the publisher of MacMinute told me what they did during a Steve Jobs Keynote address… They saw the increased load (millions of hits in a few hours), put in a few more servers and tweaked the cluster. Everything stayed up and he didn’t even have to alert them to do anything. That’s pro.
Of course that’s on the dedicated side of things, but I have had no problems with a Pair shared server.
What kind of traffic are we talking about (hits/bandwidth)? If you’re running static pages like you are, it takes a hell of a lot to bring down a server.
MobileTracker has been on Slashdot several times without much slowdown. But when my Pepsi article on MacMerc got Slashdotted, it brought us down (dynamic pages). Though to be fair we were already on a huge load much like Gigaom was.
What kind of traffic are you getting on your site, Om? And what kind of space do you need?
PS Email address doesn’t appear to be ‘optional’ for comments.
i am currently around 300,000 page views a month or so. sometimes less sometimes more …
I am also looking to move to a webhosting company and checked out a few. Lunar Pages looks interesting but I don’t know their reputation. They are charging $22.95 for 80GB per month data transfer. Netfirms is charging $14.95 for 100 GB monthly data transfer. You should beware of a number of webhosting companies that charge a very low monthly fee. In many cases, your site will be down more often than you want.