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Most Hated Blogger on MSN and Server Nightmare

Front page MSN.com on May 16, 2007

Man oh man… last couple of days have been crazy. I switched DNS like 3 times trying to find a server and provider that will handle the traffic on this foreclosure blog. I stayed up all night when I was on the front page of MSN (May 16th midnight till 9 AM PST) with Declan McCullagh’s World’s Most Hated Blogger article I was trying to see if I can do anything to keep the new dedicated server running but it came down to a crawl and then completely died.

Almost 16,000 visitors on Tuesday and almost 70,000 on wednesday! Those number would have been probably two to five times higher because if my site wasn’t down for a large part of the day on Tuesday and very very slow with intermittent downtime on Wednesday. The highest peak upto this point was 11,000 visits when I was briefly on the front page of SFgate.com (San Francisco Chronicle) for the “Would Be Real Estate Mogul” article by Carol Lloyd.

Check out the traffic graphs from SiteMeter and Google Analytics:

Crazy Traffic May 15-16th, 2007 - SiteMeter

Crazy Traffic May 15-16th, 2007 - Google Analytics

I got really pissed off (mostly at myself) for not preparing for this. I’ve been in different media since last October and had plenty of time to find a reliable hosting service.

Yesterday, a website designer buddy of mine recommended MediaTemple because they have a “digg proof” hosting (or MSN / CNet proof in my case).

At only $20/mo they have a sweet “Grid” platform which is a bunch of clustered servers that will keep your site running even if its hit by a surge of traffic. Because of the scalability this setup promised to be even better than a $100-200/month dedicated server.

If I need even more performance for an additional $20/mo I can get a dedicated MySQL container to keep my database running smooth. I will have to find a way to do some load testing to see at which point I will need something like that.

So far things are running very good. Let me know what your experience is like with the site. If you choose MediaTemple as your host, be sure to enter “iamfacingforeclosure.com” as your referring domain to give me a small kick-back. (Cash back at close… hehe)

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