I've spoken with a few members of the loyal Digg Army about the Digg Effect in the past. I liken the concept to a whole bunch on people stomping on bubble wrap until all the bubbles are gone - and then they move on to the next roll of bubble wrap. However, I never thought nor imagined what it would be like to feel like when it was my site's turn to be that bubble-wrap.
Sometime during last week, I had an idea for an article for TheTrukstoP.com. I was going to find a bunch of pictures I perceived to have been taken at the right moment, select ten of them and put it in an article.
As you may recall from posts about The Digg Effect at other sites similar to this one you are reading, I wasn't expecting the article to take off. I expected maybe 15 diggs at the most, perhaps a few extra visitors, and that would have been the end of it.
Come Sunday afternoon, a friend of mine swung by my house as we were planning on going out to catch 300 at the local movie theater. I told him about the article, and showed it to him - and was surprised to see it had reached over 800 diggs by that stage.
No worries, you probably would say. Some would say that this would be an easy issue to deal with - prepare for the Digg Effect by notifying your web host. Well, in my case, it isn't that easy.
TheTrukstoP.com was hosted at an Australian company called ISTnet. Before I moved here to the United States, I worked on the TrukstoP though those guys, and when I moved I had figured that I would continue my hosting plan with them.
The problem is, if the Digg Effect starts happening on this site at 3:00 PM Central Time in the USA, I just cannot notify my host. At that time, it was 1:00 AM Monday morning in Perth, Australia; and because ISTnet was a small, home-operated business, no-one would be there to get my e-mail or phone call.
Mind you, contacting ISTnet was the farthest thing from my mind at that point. My page views count hit 100,000 in a day, I was about to see a flick that has since become one of my favorites, and I was in the middle of lunch for crying out loud. TheTrukstoP.com had experienced the Digg Effect before (or so I had thought) with another article I had posted, called "The Story behind the Photo". The server had only choked a couple of times with that article, so I figured it would be the same situation with this.
Boy was I wrong.
As it turns out, the influx of traffic from Digg not only melted the server, but completed flooded ISTnet's wholesaler's bandwidth. It was so bad; they shut down ISTnet's web services completely.
After I got home from being blown away by the 300 Spartans, I was surprised to find an e-mail from my host, telling me they had temporarily blocked TheTrukstoP.com because of the "mysterious flood of traffic". They wanted to know why this was the case.
I shot them an e-mail and informed them about what we all now know as The Digg Effect. I didn't get a response, possibly due to the time differences, but I assumed all was good and that TheTrukstoP.com would be back up and running by the next day.
Four days later, ISTnet still had blocked TheTrukstoP.com completely. This was after numerous e-mails and numerous international phone calls with polite apologies and a diplomatic explanation about what the Digg Effect was and how it can affect small web sites and servers.
The general feeling I was getting from my host was that their wholesalers were extremely displeased with the whole event. I would probably hazard some speculation and throw out there that maybe they wanted this site blocked as long as possible because of it.
I remember the first phone call with ISTnet, in which I explained the situation to them. One of my first approaches was to literally seek advice and ask them what I could do to help ease this issue should it happen again. I was told that the only thing they could do was block all referrals made from Digg.com (WTF?) and / or block TheTrukstoP.com completely. I was told that these actions would be done very reluctantly - and I myself was very reluctant at letting either situation happening again.
After four days of no success, I finally had to concede a point within myself. Despite the fact that I've had nearly 10 years of excellent service with ISTnet both back home in Australia and here in the United States, change was going to be necessary.
Firstly, the Digg Effect smashed ISTnet and their wholesalers. But what seemed to have been smashed even more was the good relations they seemed to have with each other - the impression I was getting was that the wholesalers (whoever they are) were extremely unhappy at me, ISTnet, and Digg - I guess we were being perceived as the Axis of Evil. After nearly 10 years of a good working relationship with ISTnet, the last thing I wanted was to cause even more bad blood between their business partners.
Secondly, I had no intention of stopping the development of this site. TheTrukstoP.com has had two popular articles on Digg.com so far (as well as others on other social bookmarking sites), and there was no way I could rule out that it might happen again. In short, because the site had been blocked, I was losing traffic, and losing opportunities to work on it. In addition, I felt like this little site had somewhat outgrown ISTnet because of this.
So, I decided to move. I have now relocated TheTrukstoP.com to one of the awesome hosting plans provided by Media Temple. After some general inquiries, and the company's bold statement that their hosting plans can withstand the Digg Effect and the Slashdot Effect, I decided to go with them.
I must admit, the move was a little reluctant. But, so far so good - my traffic is back to normal, we're no longer blocked, and I am able to work on and update the site as per usual.
During the experience of totally being crushed by the Digg Effect, I did a ton of research into it. There's a whole bunch of helpful articles out there that give some excellent advice about how to combat the Digg Effect, but I truly wonder if in this day and age that there is definitely a way to combat it.
I did learn a few things from the experience though. For one, the Digg Army has a love/hate relationship with the Digg Effect. There seems to be an element over there that just loves the idea of making a small web site's server crash because of the Digg Effect. On the other hand, they also hate it - because as with most Digg users, we are immediate information junkies - we like to check out the links on Digg, and the last thing we want is an error stating that the page cannot load or cannot be found.
I appreciated some of the helpful people at Digg posting alternative mirrors and links for when the site went down. There's nothing better than that warm fuzzy feeling of having your stuff dugg, but there's nothing worse than realizing people cannot get to it because of the Digg Effect.
Usually, I submit most of my own articles to Digg.com. But I won't be submitting this one - and not because of the Digg Effect. I see a lot of people get popular articles easily by posting something about Digg, and that's just not my thing. If someone finds this of interest and valid, then they can post it - but it would be arrogant of me to believe that I could post something about Digg to Digg that I don't think everyone already knows. Besides, everyone knows what the Digg Effect is. But, hey, if you feel this article is relevant, I won't knock ya for posting it to Digg.
At the end of the day, the whole experience of TheTrukstoP.com getting crushed by the Digg Effect was not only a learning curve, but a growing pain that I guess comes with running a web site. It's brought this site into a new age with a new host... which hopefully will withstand the almighty power of be Diggstroyed (I guess we'll see, huh?). I guess if Digg.com was a superhero, it would be the Hulk - "DIGG SMASH!"
I've spoken with a few members of the loyal Digg Army about 
Boy was I wrong.
I remember the first phone call with 
At the end of the day, the whole experience of TheTrukstoP.com getting crushed by the Digg Effect was not only a learning curve, but a growing pain that I guess comes with running a web site. It's brought this site into a new age with a 
