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!