1 Day. 623 Visitors. Crash! Here’s How…
Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 7:00 am
“King for a day.” Not only the title of a cool Green Day song, but also what I was thinking to myself yesterday while watching the Blogsolid visitor statistics skyrocket. I couldn’t believe it when the final tally for the day came to 657 visits (623 unique visitors) from 62 countries around the world – and this within the first week of launching! Amazed at my new found glory, I smiled unaware of the impending doom awaiting my beloved blog. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, so here’s a rundown of the events leading to this bittersweet achievement:
Showcased
I am a Graphic Designer by trade and Blogsolid is a project that I have been working on for most of the year so far. When it finally launched on Tuesday the 31st of July 2007 I was like a proud daddy with a new baby. Blogsolid needed to be seen by the world! I was most excited to check my feeds on Wednesday morning and find Blogsolid at the top of CSS Import’s recent updates.
A closet stat-junky, I immediately fired up Google Analytics to see what sort of effect this would have. I hadn’t received many visits yet, but I noticed a visit or two from Most Inspired. This is a gallery listing feeds from all the popular web design galleries. A stroke of luck was that CSS Import happened to be the most recently updated gallery and Blogsolid was the most recent addition, so this resulted in Blogsolid being featured in the main box of the Most Inspired home page for a few hours. Here’s a screen shot:
As if that wasn’t enough to make me happy, I received an e-mail a few minutes later from The Best Designs. They had decided to add Blogsolid to their gallery as well! This was awesome – Blogsolid in 3 web design galleries at once. Woah!
Blogrolled
I added a few select websites to my blogroll from the start. These are all sites that I have learned a great deal from, and to add to my swollen head, North x East was kind enough to reciprocate by adding Blogsolid to their blogroll on Wednesday. By this time I was smiling from ear to ear.
Logged
Throughout the day the visits kept pouring in, and I kept checking Google Analytics periodically to see what was happening. The 4 abovementioned sources supplied 72% of the day’s visits. Everything was going fine. Until…
Crashed
At 9pm disaster struck. Blogsolid was no more. My monthly bandwidth had been exceeded by almost 100 megabytes and the server automatically shut the site down. This 509 error was all that was left of the once famous Blogsolid:
This was my own fault since I never checked what my monthly allowance was. It turns out I only had 300MB! What a rookie mistake. It actually occurred to me during the day to check, but I was so busy keeping an eye on my stat-boom that I forgot about it. How embarrassing.
And like a phoenix from the ashes…
12 hours later, with some friendly support from my hosting provider, we got the site back online. Goodness only knows how many potential visits Blogsolid missed during that time, but I got way more than I bargained for anyway. I have subsequently moved the site to a server located in the USA, so that means Blogsolid’s loading time will improve for America, but slow down slightly for us back here in South Africa. Bandwidth is expensive down here!
I started this entry on a punk rock note, so I will end it in the same fashion with a line from NOFX:
August 8th is a beautiful day.
Collis Says:
August 11th, 2007 at 1:08 am
That’s so great, congratulations! Something similar happened to me in NorthxEast’s early days and the site went down after getting linked on delicious’ popular page, I was a bit depressed but at the same time so excited I didn’t mind. I changed host shortly after thankfully
Anyhow congratulations again, it’s a great blog!
Danny Foo Says:
August 11th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Congratulations on being plugged.
It can do wonders for exposure.
I really like the landing page though it made me thing this was either a service or company website. But overall, good stuff.
It might also just be my browser but the Name and Main field in your comments are in a light yellow for some reason. Hmm…
redwall_hp Says:
August 11th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
I’ve nearly had that problem before. I run the site http://www.PotterSurf.com. The site all but crashed the day before the seventh Harry Potter book released (and didn’t come back up for another couple days). All the hits from Harry Potter fans were coming dangerously close to my bandwidth limit, but they were coming so frequently that the site was virtually inaccessible. Oh well, it drove my stats up and I made a bit of $$$ off my AdSense ads. My other site http://www.Webmaster-Source.com has never went down from traffic, though it does get a bit of hits.
Blogsolid Says:
August 11th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Thanks Collis, as my dad always says, “it’s not how well you start that counts, it’s how well you end!”
Hey Danny, I have noticed IE7 displays form fields in light yellow sometimes – on other sites as well. I can’t explain it, anyone got any ideas?
dusty007 Says:
August 12th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Congratulations Blogsolid! A truely fantastic looking and interesting website. Not feeling very inspired today, might write something some other time. Keep up the good work!
Michael Says:
August 13th, 2007 at 1:54 am
Welldone on the traffic. I absolutely love the design so great job on that aswell. My blog managed to get 1000 uniques in one day of its 2nd week but that was mainly social bookmarking.
Jon Wilson Says:
August 13th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
please do not forget to attend to the needs of Above The Media as well. Thank you.
prreya Says:
August 14th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
hi,its a superb site,very nice blend of ideas,i love whoever has done this,it is so cool,i love u
Blogsolid Says:
August 18th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback! I’m getting a lot of spam to this post now, so I’m closing comments.
Imar
Case study: How blog design contributed to Blogsolid's success » WordPressGarage.com Says:
September 10th, 2007 at 11:02 am
[...] Blogsolid officially launched on July 31st. The content on the site is pretty good, but not anything out of the ordinary. By August 9, the blog was picked up by a bunch of web design galleries. The onslaught of visitors crashed the poor guy’s servers for 12 hours. [...]