The digg effect and unreliable hosts

I mentioned a while back that the digg effect killed our shared hosting service and, obviously, we weren’t the only ones. This post over at The Seminal goes through a very similar situation they recently had. Interestingly, they moved to a service which specifically promises 100% uptime when the digg effect hits. Unfortunately, the site was down when I first tried to view it and apparently stayed down for about 2 hours. I think it just gets to the point where you have to accept that unless you’ve really planned your site well, with all the optimisations possible and have paid for a top notch host, the site is going to go down when the digg effect hits.

For all those smaller sites out there, a serious problem exists. If you do get dugg and the server goes down, the tech support is generally appalling. As evidenced by GoDaddy taking my site off line and not even telling me, and The Seminal’s host simply not knowing why the site went down. The strange thing is, I would be ok with a site going down under the huge stress of a digg effect, its a fairly unusual situation for most sites. What I, and many other webmasters/bloggers are not happy with, is the useless support you get.

Update:   Check out this post over at the Web 2.0 Blog to see how many sites actually go down under the digg effect on any given day.