How to Get Slashdotted and Survive Slashdot Effect

October 11th, 2005

Have you ever been Slashdotted? Did Slashdotters visit your site? If you dont know the answer, probably your site traffic has never been slashdotted before. Here is how to get slashdotted and survive your hosting server to tell about it…

Slashdotting is like a web traffic generator leads to many comments, lots of website traffic, more advertising revenue, crashed servers and expired bandwidth leading to more web hosting payments… the web traffic stats and web traffic analysis will say all. Welcome to Slashdot or better seen as /.

Photo by Wink

Wikipedia defines The Slashdot effect as “a particular example of how incoming links from a popular website can cause a smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic. The name comes from the huge influx of web traffic that often results from sites being mentioned on Slashdot, a popular technology news and information site. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – either their bandwidth is consumed or their servers fail to cope with the high strain.” [Another one]

How to get your site Slashdotted

Here is a collection of tips and tricks to get your site Slashdotted!

• VirtuOffice : How To Get Slashdotted – “Some Experiments In Slashdottery. “If you’re really looking to participate in the Slashdot effect, you may be overlooking some really easy alternatives.
• “Nicholas Roussos: How-To Get Slashdotted, The Easy Way – “I found an easy way to get them to link to your site. Yes, easy, it took me five tries the first time. Anything that you can do in five tries is easy. My second link didn’t even take that long.”
• How-To Get Slashdotted, The Easy Way (continued) – “I recieved this email from Tim Lord with an unofficial and incomplete submission guide.”
• (A Few) Words on Slashdot Submissions – “What makes a perfect Slashdot submission? A perfect Slashdot submission should make you want to cry, it is so good.
• “Slashdot FAQ : Why didn’t you post my story? – “Slashdot gets hundreds of submissions every day. Every day our authors go through these submissions, and try to select the most interesting, timely, and relevant ones to post to the homepage. There are probably as many reasons for stories to get rejected as there are stories, but here are some of the more common ones”

Slashdot experiences, Surviving Slashdot

More stories about slashdotted experiences and preparing to get slashdotted

• LinuxWorld : How to Survive Being Slashdotted – “Sometimes the traffic may exhaust a month’s worth of bandwidth allocation from its ISP in a few days. Sometimes the requests can plug up a limited connection. But, according to Malda, most often it’s poor planning and site architecture.”
• ThreadWatch : What a Slashdotting Looks Like – “Slashdotting hits instantly at peak – no build up, so there’s no time for taking precautions”
• Intertwingly : Surviving Slashdot – “I was able to survive a slashdotting yesterday. The solution was simple. My ability to do so, and so easily, speaks volumes about the power of the REST architecture.”
• Devnulled : Surviving A Slashdotting With a Celeron 466 – “My server at the time was a temporary server built out of spare parts (I host my site at home) which was over 6 years old, so I had no idea what I’d be able to do with it.”
• MyVogon Poetry : Anatomy of the Mailinator slashdotting – “It was my first time experiencing it firsthand from the server side. I thought I’d share some interesting things that happened today.”
• BusinessWeek: Less Impact from the “Slashdot Effect” – “Links on the tech news site no longer harvest the overwhelming numbers of readers they used to.”
• Dynamoo : The Slashdot Effect – “Being features on Slashdot is both an honour and a curse. The story I was in wasn’t a particularly popular story as these things go, only a medium amount of comments. However, the traffic was still significant, and the Slashdot after-effects are worth noting.”
• Problogger: What to do when you Get Slashdotted – “Getting a deluge of visitors to your blog from a larger site is what many blogger’s dreams are made of but what should you do if you want to maximise the benefit of this occurrence as and when it happens?” More from Darren – Google vs. Slashdot Traffic.
• WebmasterWorld : Getting slashdotted – “Surviving a slashdotting is not that hard, there are two key areas to look at. Bandwidth and Server Load.”
• Dunc Nuggets : The Slashdot Effect – “A few lessons, if a blog gets slashdotted its wise to turn OFF comment moderation straight away if you have it on, you wont be able to keep up.”
• The Slashdot Effect : An Analysis of Three Internet Publications – Apache httpd log files have been analyzed to show the Slashdot Effect.
• Web Servers, Earthquakes, and the Slashdot Effect – This article details how the U.S. Geological Survey Pasadena Field Office has attempted to deal with this phenomenon.
• Geek.com Slashdotted: Surviving The Slashdot Effect – “I was indeed curious about what effect being picked up by Slashdot would have on our numbers.”
• Yahoo Gets Slashdotted – “The funny thing is that it held up just fine–served by a single FreeBSD server running Apache. The hardware was nothing special. So, why is it that when most sites get “featured” on Slashdot, they crumble?”

There are some other tools to help during slashdotting

• MirrorDot – When Slashdot posts a new story, MirrorDot automagically parses the story and mirrors any linked pages and keeps your site buzz going.
• Network Mirror – automatically mirror any Slashdot-linked pages and ensure the content would remain available, even if the original site went down trying to solve the Slashdot effect.

If you have an experience or slashdotted tip, let me know, I will add it here.

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