What can you expect if your story reaches the Digg frontpage?

Yesterday my story “Linux Distributions Trends” made it to the front page of digg.com. What is the effect of that? What can you expect from having your story for a few hours on the front page of Digg? I have read of others experiences about the digg effect and they are all true… Here are some thoughts from my own experience.

So, what can you expect? Well the answer is a huge spike of traffic. In the next hours your web server will be hit very rapidly by many simultaneous requests. So if you are not ready to handle thousands of hits (this will depend from your topic and area of interest) then you are in big trouble. For my own site this was not a problem and handled everything very well (and frankly the traffic was not really that big), but this is hosted on a dedicated server in a highly respected US datacenter. The server is highly optimized to handle a huge load, and it is also serving several other high traffic sites. A site not prepared to handle this will probably be easily taken down by this kind of traffic.

Now some numbers from my experience that looked interesting to share: 5,053 total unique visitors 2,673 visitors while on the front page (about 4 hours) Top countries: United States: 48.80% - no surprise here United Kingdom: 8.23% Canada: 8.17% Browser Versions: Firefox: 76.55% !!! very nice IE: 7.79% Operating systems: Windows: 64.40% Linux: 24.81% ! nice

Here is a screenshot from my story on Digg: I would like to thank to all the peoples that took the time to vote my story and even post comments. Thank you!

Why I like Digg? Well I think that it just great to see what other peoples think about my articles. In general it is more easily to make a simple click to ‘digg’ the story than to take the time to write a comment on the article even if you liked it. So this gives a great view of the peoples that liked the story. It would be great if Digg could present some statistics on how many peoples clicked on the article, and how many ‘dugg it’ as a percent. This would be really nice.