Gnorb.NET

Website Owner’s Lesson 125: Don’t ever post a link to your site and hint that there might be thread-related “boobies” action on a Fark thread unless you know you can handle the traffic.

Case and Point: Yesterday a link showed up on Fark (with a Florida tag, no less) about FHM’s new “Sexiest Newscaster in America”, weatherbabe Elita Loresca. Of course, it being Fark, there was a lot of disagreement on this issue. Frankly I agree with most of the posts in the thread that Jackie Guerrido would have been a better option. Not by much, but still. And I feel to should be said that Melissa Theuriau is highly overrated. Very pretty from the neck up, but otherwise not anything to write home blog about. Honorable mentions were many, including Sumi Das, Jill Larrington, and Lauren Sanchez, among others.

Now, it just so happens that I have that little Elita Loresca Pics and Info page I put up (which has over time made it to #2 for the term “Elita Loresca” on Google). So, wanting to add something of substance to the conversation I said something along the lines of “I gots me more pics here,” and put up a link to the page.

Mistake.

I received an email last night from my Nate the Sys Admin that my traffic had spiked, and that the page kept going down. In fact, here’s what he wrote:

First off I have to say. Congratulations. Your site is getting tons of
traffic. Specifically this page: http://www.gnorb.net/uncategorized/20060116/elita-loresca-pics-and-info/

(obviously, sexy sells

And the wacky folks are coming from this page: http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2304675

(also the linked images are getting loaded off of fark).

I do believe the situation is better under control now - as far as the server goes. Rewriting URLS typically creates a strain on memory (specially as MySQL is a big beast).

I get the feeling maybe this will chill a bit after the post sits out there for awhile. If you keep logs or tracking, you might check it out yourself.

I shall politely say since your site has grown, you might be advised to start looking into hosting alternatives. I know of several good ones - linode.com offers virtual hosts complete with root access starting at $20/month, Go Daddy is good and cheap, and I personally use a company called Tera Byte www.tera-byte.com, they are mid-range priced but have the best customer service.

This is not an ultimatum or anything, but I think for your benefit you will get better service and no silly temporary resource problems if you move on to greener pastures. If you should choose that I would be more than happy to get you moved over, with database dumps/restores, moving code over etc.

I spoke to Nate some time later and as it turns out, my dinky little page, which sends out most of its info via RSS feeds and gets something along the lines of 150 page views a day, started getting upwards of 20 page views a minute. According to MyBlogLog (which I can’t really rely on for stats) I got over 1,000 visitors from that Fark link in just a few hours. In combination with the 200 or so I got from folks doing Google queries, that wasn’t too bad. Too bad nobody thought of helping me out with my newly burgeoning bandwidth costs by, you know, checking out our advertisers (clicking on the Google ads).

Anyway, if you were trying to hit the page yesterday and kept coming up short (seriously, no pun intended in any of this), then you’ll probably be able to have at it today. If not today, then tomorrow, after the story has left Fark’s front page.

Finally, to make up for my little faux pas, here are some of the pics from the Fark thread. If you’re reading this from the front page, then click the following link to see the pics.

Addendum
Honestly, though, even after all this, I gotta say it: as cute as they are, The Wife beats every single one of these hands down. No comparison. She wins. Curves, voice, smile… all there. And no, this is not a “don’t be mad at me, honey” statement. It’s the God’s honest truth. As for pics of her… well, I’ll keep those to myself.

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