Gargles.net finally got dugg after about two weeks of existence and it was an interesting experience. I had just woken up and I noticed that all my sites were having problems such as error code 500 or mySQL errors. I was about to send my host an email when I noticed that I had about 500 simultaneous users on the site.

I, obviously, panicked since that was the most reasonable course of action (not!). Unfortunately, WP-Cache plugin wasn’t helping much and the server load was getting intense. I was afraid that my web host was going to suspend my account.

Fortunately, I had the idea of just going to the page that was dugg and copying the source and pasting it into a static HTML page. Since I had permalinks activated I just created a subfolder/subdirectory with the same name as the permalink and placed an index.html file in it. I pasted the source of the actual dugg page and almost instantly the server load came down.

My site graph after being dugg:

The adsense click through rate was terrible. Diggers are usually Internet savvy individuals who only are interested in the content of your site. They are great at getting you back links though. I’ve noticed that I’ve been linked from a large number of sites and I bet that will help my page rank.

Lessons that I learned:

1) Try to keep a cool head during a digging;
2) Create a static page with the content to get your server load down (WP-Cache should have done that but I don’t know what happened);
3) Try to throughly edit your content for errors and mistakes or else the visitors will do it for you (and it’s not pretty.. plus you owe it to them).

I look forward to many more future diggs and dots and farks

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