How To Get Your Blog Shut Down in 3 Easy Steps
Have you ever visited a blog or other site expecting to find content, but instead are confronted with an error page of some sort? Isn't that cool? The first thought that runs through your head is “Wow, this must be a really popular site if they crashed their server” — c'mon, you know it is.
If you have your own site, I'll bet you've also thought to yourself “I wish I could do that so other people will think I'm cool too.” LOOK NO FURTHER! I'll let you in on the secret of how to accomplish the appearance of a crashed site. All you need are three things:
- An super-great web host (like HostGator)
- A database taxing stats plugin (like FireStats)
- A spike of traffic
Allow me to elaborate.
The foundation for getting your blog shut down lies with your web host. You need to find a host that will shut you down first, and ask questions later. This is important, so don't brush it off. Do your research on web hosts and make sure you find compelling evidence that they will respond to database traffic poorly. It's also a good idea to buy their cheapest hosting plan so they see you as an insignificant customer.
Now that the foundation is down, it's time to build the house. You'll want to install a statistics package on your server that taxes your database every time somebody visits the site. If you really want to go nuts, make sure you display some of those stats on every page of your blog (like in a sidebar). This way the stats package will be writing to and reading from the database with each visit — and we all know databases hate being bothered.
Now for the final step — set fire to the house. Write a good article (something like Indoor Macro Photography Project for Rainy Days) and let it get Dugg or Stumbled. If it's good enough, your site will receive a ton of traffic in a short amount of time. This is the key to the whole process, so spend the extra time getting it right.
When you get that rush of traffic, your stats package will go nuts on the database. When the database goes bonkers, your host admin will freak out and shut you down right after you go to bed. Then they'll send you an email stating that your database was shut down. If you're lucky, and you've chosen your host properly, they will take a really long time to fix things.
So that's it. Three simple steps to getting your blog shut down. Pull this off, and your popularity factor will go through the roof. If you manage to accomplish this feat of coolness, make sure you contact me so I too can bask in the glory of your disabled site and pay my respects to a webmaster so deserving of such an achievement.
This post is dedicated to HostGator for all you've done to for me. Thank you for taking so long to fix the problems you've caused using your ready-fire-aim approach to site administration. And thank you for not helping me over the phone — it's almost like you knew I prefer to sit and wait anxiously for those online support tickets to go through.
Richard
April 4, 2007You may find GoStats to be a worthy replacement for any log file analysis tool.
bwb
April 4, 2007Ya the problem is when your site is having problems you are causing probs on the entire server, so every other site on your shared server was having mysql problems because of the load you were generating. Plus imagine hostgator getting calls and having to refund people who see that prob if the probs lasted that long. Hosting companies that focus on mass client bases arn’t going to care about 1 person, I recommend moving to a digg proof host or a vps. Mass shared hosting is good to save money till you get the traffic.
Plus they prob get people telling them they will fix it in 5 min all the time and after a while you learn you can’t trust people as then the servers go down again and then you owe 149 people their months hosting fee because uptime was below 99.9 percent.
btw, I run webhostingunleashed.com so sorry if this is harsh but I get 2 to 10 emails a day on the same issue. People just need to understand that you need to get better hosting if you have a popular site. Plus from your articles I’m betting you will be dugg again cause they are good.
bwb
April 4, 2007what do you expect for under 10 bucks a month? Cheap shared hosting is well, um, cheap shared hosting. If your site is running lots of php/mysql and you get slashdotted or dugg its not rocket science. Get a dedicated server or vps to handle it.
Brian Auer
April 4, 2007Good point on the cheap shared hosting comment. I knew I might run into problems eventually, but it was how they handled it that ticked me off. They just shut it down and didn’t do anything about it for over 12 hours despite several emails and phone calls. If they had notified me of the issue, I could have taken care of it in 5 minutes.
bwb
April 4, 2007Hah sorry 🙂
Ya and if you are running wordpress there is some easy cache stuff you can setup too that will serve your pages cached instead of generating them. If you really get popular there is some really cool mysql/php stuff you can do to prevent it from happening but with that sort of thing you usually need to have your own environment so you can tweak it all.
btw, i would no do a semi ded as that is still shared with other big sites. A vps or dedicated has resources just for you.
Brian Auer
April 4, 2007Darn you for coming in here and making sense!
I do plan to move up to a semi-dedicated, then dedicated server as the site grows. I just don’t have enough traffic right now to justify the extra expense.
I took care of the stats package that was causing the problem. So the next time I crash the server or get shut down, it will have to be a much bigger spike of traffic. If that does happen, I’ll take it as my cue to upgrade.
Thanks for the advice, but you ruined my self-pity party. Oh well, moving on with my life now…