The Digg Effect
Posted in Scott on January 30th, 2009 by Scott Weaver – Be the first to comment34,429.
That’s how many unique hits the blog got today and it’s the most uniques I’ve had to any website without paying for it through PPC.
Today started with me waking up to a ‘Bandwidth Exceeded/Site Suspended’ message and I knew either I had forgotten to check the bandwidth and a few hits had pushed it over the limit, or the unlikely had happened and Digg had killed me. I increased the bandwidth to around 10gb and the site was still down. That’s when my eyebrows went up and I checked my recent Digg submissions. Sure enough, I’d been front paged and there were angry Diggers asking for mirrors and describing the easy website take-down as ‘pathetic.’
It was glorious.
My first experience with the Digg effect and all for a picture of a kid jumping into flood water. Now all I had to do was to get the site back up and running with WP Super Cache! After about an hour of back and forth with support, I had the site back up with cached pages serving the digg users and everything was beautiful.
From that point on, my day has been spent doing work in between stat checks. It doesn’t bring in any money or anything like that, but it just amazes me how many people swarm to sites once they hit the front page of social bookmarking sites.
The hope is that the site gains some backlinks and a little more link power for future endeavors.
Out of all the things today, I am most amused with being the #1 result on Google for ‘invisible hammock.’ 
Strange day, but great experience. Hope it’s not the last!
-Scott
