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Stumbleupon traffic surge shut down our server!

by mattyprimmer
11 replies
Hey everyone,

Just wondered if anyone has ever had this problem...We got so much traffic from Stumble that our server couldn't handle it and shut down. It took close to 12 hours to get things back in order! (slow hostgator support) Can't even imagine how much traffic we missed out on because of this. We ended up upgrading and setting up some caching plugins with Wordpress.

When the site came back the traffic was just a small trickle from Stumble.

Just wondering if anyone has had this happen and if there is anything we can do to let stumble know that we're back up and they can continue sending the big traffic?

Thanks!
#server #shut #stumbleupon #surge #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author Randall Magwood
    Did you make any money from all of this traffic?
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    • Profile picture of the author Manuelcrc
      Originally Posted by Randall Magwood View Post

      Did you make any money from all of this traffic?
      It's good to have lot's of traffic but better to make money from such traffic (or at least get some of them to opt-in).
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    • Profile picture of the author AprilCT
      Originally Posted by Randall Magwood View Post

      Did you make any money from all of this traffic?
      You typed the first question I was going to ask.

      Now for more questions. Why did you upgrade? Will this be an ongoing thing with a lot of traffic to make it worthwhile?

      Would it have been possible to request that Hostgator put your site on another server that maybe isn't as busy as the one you are on?

      Did you check the traffic stats and confirm that it was your site that overloaded the server?

      Should Hostgator have been able to handle that traffic with the plan you had?
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      • Profile picture of the author mattyprimmer
        Originally Posted by AprilCT View Post

        You typed the first question I was going to ask.

        Now for more questions. Why did you upgrade? Will this be an ongoing thing with a lot of traffic to make it worthwhile?

        Would it have been possible to request that Hostgator put your site on another server that maybe isn't as busy as the one you are on?

        Did you check the traffic stats and confirm that it was your site that overloaded the server?

        Should Hostgator have been able to handle that traffic with the plan you had?
        We upgraded because this is my #1 website. We're always growing and I'm pretty confident this is the one that's going to make me fairly well off in the future. Why not get it performing better now.

        I don't think they would put us on another server just for asking. We would have to pay for some VPS or dedicated I'm pretty sure regardless. I don't think they would ever want to admit one server is slower than another. Maybe I'm wrong.

        Yes, Hostgator should have been able to handle this traffic load with this plan, but it was more CPU usage than anything else. We were up to 25% of the entire servers CPU usage and that was with every 3rd or so request being completely denied. I guess they have protocol to shut you down if you reach 25% on a shared server.

        The annoying thing is that we were never told that our site was slow or anything like that prior. It always performed fine. It was just all of a sudden shut down and the regular support can't help you with this stuff. You get the old, "I'm sorry sir I know you're frustrated we're going to escalate this" lol. You need to escalate the problem and that means the people with actual control can look at it, but this also means it turns into 2 hours between responses with no real solutions presented. Just suggestions like, "try caching plugins."

        We lost a lot of traffic. Disappointed to say the least. I thought HostGator was top notch before for their support. Rethink
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  • Profile picture of the author mclenhard
    Sorry to say, but I think there's not much else you can do other than resubmitting yourself. Im guessing this was not a paid advertisement? If it wasn't what content was it that went viral? If you could make another post go viral you could get more traffic. Hope this helps some
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  • Profile picture of the author jamesrich1
    Hostgator has always had lighting fast support whenever I have had a problem, which is rare. Hope you had tons of opt ins and sales...
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  • Profile picture of the author Tonylee93
    Honestly, I get a lot of my traffic from stumbleupon and I love it! but it really doesn`t help my ratio of time spent on my site, and the traffic doesn`t have a long term affect like buying products or adsense. So sometimes its pointless traffic
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  • Profile picture of the author mattyprimmer
    We have been picked up a few times and traffic always increases from then on. We're coming close to 6k hits everyday but this day was just huge!

    I don't really want to get into specifics on the site, but we always make money - and it's always growing. It's a content site. Mostly adsense and ad sales.

    They were saying it's not so much bandwidth, but more CPU usage. We couldn't find anything serious, neither could they. We installed some caching plugins.

    This should be something all of you learn from... even if your site isn't getting any traffic yet. It happens fast in this business - get the caching plugins installed on your sites to speed up load times and avoid what happened to us!

    Before I went to bed we were getting 350-400 requests for the page every minute. Site was taking forever to load and almost every 3rd refresh by us was getting 503 errors. Looks like we're all good now. Fingers crossed!
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  • Profile picture of the author Cataclysm1987
    You might want to try cloud hosting from VPS.net. Their plans start out really low but have incredible bandwidth and power, more than Hostgator I find.

    Plus it runs off of multiple servers in the cloud, which means if you melt one server...poof! Transfer all the traffic to another one!
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    • Profile picture of the author AprilCT
      Matty ... best of luck to you. It certainly is much better to have your site busy than not. It's a shame people were turned away.
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