I'm using the baby plan with HostGator. Is it even worth getting on Digg front page? Will it crash my server? What can I do to prevent it from crashing?
Will upgrading to the Swamp plan make it any easier to stay up? Swamp plan gives unlimited bandwidth, not sure if that makes any difference...
My server crashed but it wasn't bandwith, it was server CPU usage. My code wasn't optimized and my pages weren't cached, so every visitor had to execute >20 different files just to see one page. How much bandwith do you get each month? If you're expecting a lot of visitors its probably worth the upgrade anyway. You don't want your website to go down before you upgrade its bandwith, it could take a lot longer to fix than taking some images down. I was able to get my site back up in about 5 minutes...
i use baby host plan... i would like the same... baby gator gets 1000gb bandwidth i think.. unless its more now... how visitors would it take to crash 1000gb of bandwidth?
The month I hit the front page I used >2,600 GB of bandwith and 99.9% of my traffic was coming from Digg and sites pointing to my article on Digg. But remember, its not just the bandwith that with crash your shared hosting account, its CPU usage that is usually the first to go!
I believe that's total bandwidth for a month. The Digg effect on a non-optimized page could crash it in a matter of minutes with thousands of hits. The Digg effect is essentially doing the same thing as a DDOS attack. Sites that have a robust hosting package and are optimized for high traffic will be able to withstand the onslaught while the rest go down. If your page is written in efficient code and has few or no pictures, it can be pretty hard to bring down. There have been some Digg stories about sites that have been able to withstand the Digg effect while running on rather antiquated "servers," such as an Apple Newton, so it really all depends on how you're set up to handle that kind of traffic (although having full control of the actual servers would also help a lot, no matter how old they are).