Cherry Avenue's Katie Griffen:

Yesterday at about 9:00 PM, two of our articles hit the front page of Digg. The Googlenairs and Iconoclasm: The Office both "became popular" within 20 minutes of each other. As far as we were concerned, this was a huge success with lots of potential traffic coming from one of the Internet's most popular locations! However, this initial sense of thrill quickly died off as this conversation took place between me and our chief web administrator.

[9:01] John: Hey! We hit front page!
[9:01] Andrew: Great!
[9:02] John: I think the site is dead.
[9:02] Andrew: Shit.

The "Digg effect" literally took down our web server in under a minute. At this point, I panicked as I realized we were missing out on hits that we had worked so hard to get! When our site finally got where we wanted it, it simply had failed. Thankfully our administrator knew what he was doing and within 10 minutes we were up and running again. Through this experience, we learned a few tips on how to perform disaster recovery when the Digg effect overloads your web server and are delighted to share some of them with you.

1) Don't Panic
Well, maybe you have to for a minute. You want to get your site back online ASAP. You want to move quickly and have a game plan. You want to know what to do before you get in this position. Literally, every second counts. Know where your towel is.

2) Have a dependable host as a second option.
You might say "you should have a dependable host at the get go" and, well, you'd be right. However, in our case, we had not had an experience of the amount of traffic coming from this sort of situation, and a host's ability in enduring extreme load is often difficult to gauge. We found a reliable, fast web host, but even that was not necessarily a good indicator of their dependability, as we quickly experienced.

Now, we know you don't want to simply be paying for two hosts all the time. If you have a generous friend with another host, it's worth trying to switch to that host and see how it holds up. In our case, a cheap shared plan with ixwebhosting.com was at the ready when our site went down. Until you know how your server will react under high loads, having a second option is indispensable. If you don't have a friend, ixwebhosting offers plans for something like $5 a month and I'm sure it's competitors aren't much higher. Until you know how your site will act under load, you need to have a backup.

3) Have an off-site backup of all your content
If your main website has gone down because of all this traffic, you obviously will have a hard time getting your data off of it. Have a backup of your entire site on your personal computer or at another location that you can easily access it at. Make sure you also back up any databases that are not included with your normal files. Without this backup, you'll be absolutely lost in any hope of restoring your site.

Also, consider mirrors like duggmirror.com, which posting a link to from an article appears to cache it for the page's impending doom. If you're unsure of how your server will perform, put a mirror in a comment immediately after uploading in case of such emergencies.

4) Know how to change the name servers
Changing the DNS servers on your domain name to redirect it to a different host often takes up to 48 hours. This can obviously not be seriously considered. However, most web hosts in which you have decent control over your domain names will allow you to change what are known as "A" records--these will point from the DNS server to the specific server that your website is on. You can usually still get to your website's control panel while it is down and make these changes, so that your host's DNS servers will simply forward your visitors elsewhere. More information can be found at this useful place for the interested.

5) Monitor your article's progress
If we had not been watching our articles on Digg, our site would probably still be down. Thankfully, within two minutes of our article becoming popular we saw that our site was down and were able to get it back online within 10 minutes. It's always good to keep an eye out when you are expecting a high load of traffic and Digg is the ultimate example.