Today, we jumped off our chairs when we realized what had just happened. One of the major platforms that we are developing, Gigasize, was dugg today... and I can assure you it was totally unplanned. We were in alpha phase, testing out functionalities, improving usability, etc., and then BOOM... thousands and thousands of visitors, peaking at around 6-7k / hour at some point. Servers got a very tough ride; we got some downtime, and we got lots of feedback on the comments section of the Digg post. The great thing about this is we got a stress test for free; we were about to do it and then, out of the blue, tons of hits! I think this was a tough first test but a great one, considering it quickly revealed the 3-4 majors points we had to work on to get the site running smoothly.
I got the chance to get an interview with Ammar Khan, director of GigaSize, to have his comments on the events:
"Our goal is to provide the best file sharing platform on the planet! We hope to be the UPS or FedEx for huge files. We didn't think that people would catch onto GigaSize while we were in Alpha testing and digg us so soon. We were the 2nd most dugg post of the day today (2088 diggs so far)! We thank everyone for their Digg comments (especially the tough ones); we really want to offer users the best file sharing experience. Anyone who wants to contact us can provide us feedback here."
Well, lessons learned here: sometimes you don't have to linkbait yourself - it just happens! Stay tuned!
Very impressive!
I am building a webmaster blog (just as a hobby). I did some tests on the main social networks posting a couple of articles.
I found that Reddit got me much more visitors than Digg or any others (Google Analytics says: Reddit: 23.32%+ 14.42% and Digg: 6.73%).
Interestingly enough, I got also 19.23% of my traffic from one single blog where I posted a comment about my experimentations.
Obviously this is all very small numbers (pick at 188/day) but I hope to learn from my experimentations and build these number quickly ;-)
More on this at: https://mastertheweb.blogspot.com
Congrats, Guillaume - I'm thrilled to see that your hard work has paid off and that the community is giving you the respect and attention you deserve.
As for the ads - I'm sure you discovered what we've learned with Digg visitors - none of them click on AdSense :)
Okay, well I will give you another chance. ;)
https://digg.com/tech_news/Opps_Gigasize_1_5_G...
Just curious, what are the 3-4 points you learned?
Also, one of the digg posts mentioned the lack of ads but I see ads now. Was that a quick addition after the digg traffic hit?
Hey Tom!
Main points we've learned through the process:
1- uploading module needs to be redone completely and optimized for massive upload / download. We hired extreme programmers to correct the situation and offer a more stable / viable solution for all users. 2- although we already knew it and were about to do a newer / bolder setup, we need a robust server structure to be able to server thousands of downloads simultaneously. Some great folks just got hired to get us the network we need! 3- as Rand said, the goal wasn't to monetize with AdSense; ads are there right now more as a "meanwhile we get something that really fits our needs"... maybe Federated Media when we get enough visitors 4- bandwidth stability: we are considering switching from CoGent to Cachefly or another similar company to ensure a more stable environment 5- last lesson: be cautious about what you do in early versions; you can get good / bad press pretty quick!