Stages of the Digg/Slashdot Effect

"The Slashdot (Digg) effect, also known as slashdotting, is the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic...Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. "

-Wikipedia

Stage 1: You post something

Stage 2: Someone (perhaps yourself) notices your blog and decides to put it on Digg


Stage 3: Visitors like your post and digg it.


Stage 4: More visitors really like your post and digg it.

Stage 5: Your post becomes a phenomenon...

(Courtesy of: http://webaccess.unifr.ch)

Stage 6: Visitors begin to see this very frequently, traffic exceeds server capacity.

(Courtesy of: http://www.studycomputing.co.uk)

Stage 7: The Server Shuts Down

(Courtesy of: http://img112.imageshack.us/)

Stage 8: High traffic causes servers to start on fire.

(Courtesy of: http://www.gamerandy.com)

Stage 9: Eventually your post causes rolling brown-outs due to the lack of power support for the server

(Courtesy of: http://lifeboat.com)

Stage 10: The final stage includes widespread panic, looting, and few survivors.