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They’re not angry, I was just kidding. But they are going for your server. Let’s say you have a site. 300-500 visitors per day. Someone submits one of your posts to let’s say Digg. And in 14 hours that post gets on the front page of Digg. That’s great news. That’s what you wanted. Tons of traffic to your site. This is what you wanted. But let’s think about it for a little. 500 visitors per day means about 21 visitors per hour which means 0,3 visitors per minute. That’s not going to kill your server, even if you are using free hosting. Now let’s imagine the Digg front page situation: 10,000 visitors in 24 hours means 416 visitors per hour which means 7 visitors per minute. But you won’t get 7 visitors each minute for 24 hours. The first 40-60 minutes are going to be crucial. Being on the first page of Digg you will get some 7 visitors per second. This is bad news. This is even worse if you use a database based publishing platform (like Wordpress). Because every time a someone visits your site your wordpress will have to contact the database and display some content. And if you take into consideration the fact that most $7 hosts allow only 10 simultaneous connections to the database (only 10 users at the same time) you will realize how wrong is this. Most hosts use settings like this not to break down the server. Because if you allow more than 10 connections your server will have to process a large amount of information in a fraction of a second and it will go down.

So before you even think about getting tons of visitors in an instant, you should think about handling them in some way. If you get your post on the front page of any social site and your site doesn’t work you will hate yourself (just like I did when it first happened to me). Use stuff like WP-Cache or similar (you’ll find more about this on Google). They work. Don’t think about switching hosts. Any $7 host will give you the same thing. If you want a host that can handle 7 visitors per second you’ll have to pay about $80/month (maybe less). And if you usually get 500 visitors per day you don’t want to pay $960 year for that.

So before getting a flood of traffic you should brace yourself, using simple and effective methods.

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