Digg’s flurry over Jane’s map has died away – mostly.
If you make hosting decisions for your business, then you may be interested in the traffic that hit.
Digg reports the story went ‘popular’ 4 days ago now. But checks revealed that for a bit over 2 days of Digg frenzy, Jane’s Global Warming Mindmap had:
- 34,457 Views of the Mind Map; from
- 31,595 Unique IP addresses
That is a rough average of 16,000 Unique Visitors /day.
Jane got 1,158 Diggs and 362 comments. Higher than many, but not the highest by a long shot.
(Her mind map is now #3 globally for images about global warming.)
Now, you can’t take Digg commenters too seriously. Jane is very good humoured about things – a lot more so than I think I would.
One helpful ‘Snigger’ (that is a Snide Digger) suggested “if you can’t host it don’t post it”, which since this is the second time I’ve mentioned it you can clearly see annoyed me. (Our server didn’t crash, but it was so slow for about 2 hours it appeared to be off the air).
Looking at those stats is an eye opener. We have a lot more capacity in place than a small business would have with a shared hosting account. In this case Jane’s site was on a VPS with about 1Gb of RAM and a fast CPU (which both coped with Digg, it was the image serving throughput that slowed).
So if we take it seriously that if you are going to put out interesting content you have to be able to deal with the whimsical needs of Digg users, what are the options for a small business hosted website:
- shared hosting, say $5-$40/mth – dead on arrival if a Digg event hits
- virtual private server $25-80/mth – more power but a lot harder to manage, very tricky for a small business – also not all VPS can deal with Digg – in our case Digg had linked to an image that was over 100kb
- dedicated server $200-400/mth – good chance of managing a Digg event, but very pricey
Who wants to pay $200-400/mth for a dedicated server, or manage the complexities of a VPS?
If you have a typical low cost shared hosting provider for your website, you are probably doomed if a Digg event hits.
One day S3 equivalent capabilities for high speed image and media serving will be the norm. They aren’t yet, but they will be. We are going to build it in to all our site hosting, and we won’t be the first or last.
And I’ll stick with zero cost hosting for clients – the more I explore this the better I like the model. Jane’s mind map makes clear is that to do content marketing (and teach people how to do it better) you have to have high capacity hosting in place that takes Digg in its stride.
As for Global Warming, I’m pleased to report that after reading the comments on Jane’s mind map, global warming just doesn’t exist. It is a plot, concocted by Hippys it seems. Probably to steal all our chocolate or something. Digg traffic is high on colour and movement but not the sharpest when it comes to science it would seem.