ShortMinds Webcomic

Yesterday I hit the front page of Digg! And then my site went down for 10 hours. What should have been the best day of traffic ever turned out to be the worst in about a week. Which has also lead to, I’m assuming, today’s traffic being just as poor. Six hundred fourteen connections at the same time caused my host to take me down. I didn’t exceed anything else just concurrent connections. Apparently Site5 hosting, not linking them because I am pissed, only allows 50 concurrent connections. After a bit of shopping around yesterday 50 is actually pretty high compared to other shared hosts. Everyone else was around 20 and they all told me the same thing, if you are going to get dugg you are going to need a dedicated server. Decent dedicated servers cost quite a bit and that’s not an expense I can justify right at this time, especially with no proof of sustained traffic yet. I definitely want the site to grow and hopefully in the future I will need a dedicated server once again.

But why was the site down for 10 hours and why is it up now if it is still suffering the Digg effect? I got a nice email from my host in the middle of the night last night that said you are getting a lot of inbound traffic so we are blocking you. After a hectic morning running around town hitting appointments I didn’t see the email until 6 hours after it was sent. I responded immediately to it after thanking the guy that submitted me to Digg and began to wait. Getting to work and periodically checking the site I still had no response 4 hours later. So I fired up live support. The initial lady I got was less than useful with the conversation going something like this: “Hello Nathan”, “I see you have an open ticket, I will let the Tech guys know”, “I guess you have walked away”, “Buh bye.”(Paraphrased) The chat ended as I was formulating a response. Call me crazy but I decided to try again and this time got some guy that looked at my problem and released the block on my site. Thank you again sir! In the meantime while the site was down the once popular story on Digg got burried. I had completely missed out on the traffic of the Digg effect. So while my rather cheap shared hosting survived the Reddit front page and being Stumbled it simply could not survive Digg.

The surge of traffic from reddit and StumbleUpon lately has been primarily due to one comic; Explaining Greatness. Most people have enjoyed it while others have not and I will address some of their issues below. Hitting the front page of Reddit, being stumbled and being dugg have lead to a massive surge of new users. I’m very pleased to look at the numbers and see 95% new visitors and a fairly low bounce rate of 50% in comparison. I’ve also looked through the analytics and what not to find that a decent amount of people clicked through the entire archive and some even clicked through the origins archive.

When I decided to make the Explaining Greatness comic I thought it might get a few hits and then be deemed as old news. Like I’ve said before I did some googeling to try to find something about it out there and couldn’t find anything, but in all honestly I fully expected to be hit with the old news get with the times stick. I did not make the comic to kiss Randall’s ass or ride his coat tail. I made the comic to depict something I found funny and amusing, see how this works now, about another webcomic that happens to be one of the reasons I decided to start my own. I don’t read that many comics any more due to free time and work, but the comics I list over to the right under Other Comics are the handful of comics I make time to read whenever they are updated because they will always be the comics that inspired me to finally start my own.

Cheers to everyone, time to get to work, and send me an email if you too have experienced anything like this or you have your own webcomic or maybe you want to start a podcast, I dunno, anything.

-Nathan

Blizzard delivers again with this awesome video. I can’t wait to hear a release date. I think they might actually release before Christmas this year and I may just have to re-activate my account.