Prevent site downtime from traffic surges

[Brian Turner]

Shoemoney posts a nice little tutorial on how to avoid your site going down if it receives a sudden surge of traffic from sites such as Slashdot, Digg, etc.

Add this to your .htaccess file in your root folder:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?digg.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?slashdot.org [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?slashdot.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?fark.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?somethingawful.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?engadget.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?boingboing.net [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?del.icio.us
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.platinax.co.uk.nyud.net:8080/$1 [R,L]

Of course, don't forget to remove "platinax.co.uk" and replace your domain in that line.

I've tested it out on one of my sites I was trying to set up for a Digg - although it's not being taken up by Digg users, at least it is redirecting traffic to the mirror site, which then links direct to the original site.

This should at least help prevent any traffic surge from the social sites from overloading your hosting account.

Those on dedicated servers should be fairly fine - when I hosted Threadwatch a while back the Platinax server took 3 Slashdots over 10 days in its stride - but for those on shared hosting accounts, a sudden traffic surge could get you suspended.

[WSC-Will]

You could probably add theregister.co.uk to that list of referrers. I believe they're capable of slashdotting too.

[Brian Turner]

Indeed, but the chances of the larger news organisations online picking up a link. I dunno, it happens - I know James at UH Hosting got linked to from the Register - but the sites listed are traditionally built on refering traffic to other sites.