Make Your Website Digg Resistant

If you are running a popular Wordpress site or blog, and do not have dedicated hosting or a VPS, you will no doubt have succumbed to the so-called Digg Effect. It is caused by too many visitors piling into your post when it makes the grade on Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot or some other social bookmarking site.

The results can be disastrous if your web host does not automatically upgrade your bandwidth allowance or if your site crosses some resources threshold. It can make at best visitors seeing a blank page, but at worst, they will be presented with a page telling them that you have broken the host’s rules and must contact them immediately.

It can happen to anyone, just write some great content on a regular basis and sooner or later a Stumbler or a Digger will find it and the resulting buzz will take your visitor numbers through the roof. So, how can you prepare for the onslaught in advance and make the most of the peaks?

Earner$ Blog has a great run down of the various updates and optimizations you should put in place. You should visit their site for the complete skinny, but we’re summarized the main points here, so you can see what is required to Diggproof your site in advance.

• Make sure you are running the latest version of Wordpress
• Install and enable the wp-cache plugin
• Disable and remove unused plugins
• Optimize your MySQL database
• Activate the MySQL query cache
• Configure Apache for best performance
• Run the PHP compiler cache

If none of those work and you still suffer the Digg effect, then it is almost certainly time to switch to a more robust hosting service.