What do you do when you’ve become too popular? I have a problem…
Someone Stumbled one of my posts with StumbleUpon. For the past four days, I have seen phenomenal traffic. Check this out.
I usually get 300-350 hits a day. As you can see, the past few days I’ve been getting far more. I was reveling in all that traffic until today when I got this email from my web host:
Your account has been causing really high server loads the past 4 days…
Can you please work on fixing this issue? If it’s not fixed I’ll have to suspend the site as it’s causing the server to crash at certain times of the day.
OK, a paid-blogger NEVER wants to see those words “suspend” at any time. My web host is being really generous, giving me time to work things out. I’ve heard horror stories of other hosts who just rip the rug out from under you, so I am thankful they have given me a little breather.
But what do I do? I am on a “budget” plan, and I’ve used up half my bandwidth for the month. I don’t want my blog to be causing everyone else’s blogs to crash… What would you do in such a case?
I’ve offered to write a post for the hosting company free of charge; I’ve offered to remove the Stumbled post for a while (but would that help? people would still be hitting my blog), and I’ve assured my host that Stumbles are usually temporary. How do you stop thousands of people from visiting your blog??
I hope that my conciliatory offers are acceptable…. but I am at wit’s end. What a day it’s been! First, my htaccess wipe-out at my other blogs, now this! I just wanna go to bed and give a good cry! 
UPDATE: I called my web host and they are so wonderful! They are willing to work with me, and they understand that Stumbles are usually temporary. I have some homework ahead of me, though– the theme I am using is a little too beefy so I’m going to have to shop for a slimmer theme. Tomorrow I’m going to check the stats with my web host, and see how things go. So now I can get some sleep tonight, at least! what a day, whew!
12. August 2008 at 7:01 pm
It is the first time I have felt the need to apologize for stopping by someone’s blog!
Hope you get it worked out. Good Luck!
12. August 2008 at 9:28 pm
Thanks to some great advice, I’m working on the theme and hopefully this will alleviate the problems. I’ll have more on the issue after I call my web host tomorrow. Thanks for visiting. I think. lol
13. August 2008 at 12:47 am
You could just get the wp-supercache plugin and never worry about it again.
13. August 2008 at 1:09 am
Turnip, thank you for your comment. I have heard of supercache. I tried it with my other web hosts, but they complained that it was messing up some files. I’d also read that it could be quite buggy, so I decided to stay away from it.
But that was half a year ago, an eternity in technology progression. I’ll have to check it out again.
Thanks for your comment.
13. August 2008 at 3:05 am
Who Knew? Most peeps want more traffic and then to get in trouble for it. That’s crazy ain’t it. Well, we have both been droppin entrecard on eachother for about 2 weeks I think.. hmm I think if you drop on mine I will drop on yours. But, if you don’t then I understand…. Shut down a blog due to to much traffic… How silly. Good luck sweetie
13. August 2008 at 6:04 am
more trouble, dropping an ec here.. hope all’s well now.
13. August 2008 at 7:16 am
Congratulations for getting hit so often via Stumble. But I’m terrified of this happening to me and having my blog get yanked. It’s ironic. The goal is to get more traffic, but when you get it in a flood, it’s a bad thing. Geez. Everything in moderation I guess.
13. August 2008 at 9:37 am
Wow, that is rough; and to think that we strive for such things normally. I know most people look down on people that use Blogger instead of WordPress but that is one of the reasons that I did. I use Yahoo for web hosting on my main site and have unlimited bandwidth and data storage. The catch is that your site can not grow too fast it has to be nicely spaced out and you can not use it to just store a ton of files. I made 200 pages in 3 months and decided to slow it down and blog for a bit. I did not want to get Yahoo mad at me. I think someone comes and steals your car when Yahoo gets mad.