Finding a place to host your site is a big pain. You have to do a lot of research to find the perfect host or run the risk of having to move everything again. This is even more important when you have several sites like I do. I was in that position a few years back when I needed to get set up on a dedicated server. I found Codero, and haven’t looked back since. In fact, my server kept up with an onslaught of Digg traffic on more than one occasion, allowing me to capitalize on all the new visitors where other sites my have just crumbled and lost all that traffic. The other day, Codero sent out a press release that they’re having a server sale again. When they have a sale, they have a sale, so I thought I’d share it. This time, they’re offering up 50% off their dedicate servers in a year-end sale that I’d urge anyone in the market for a dedicated server to take advantage of.
Lenexa, Kan. – December 1, 2010 – As the year approaches its end, Codero is taking measures to assist businesses that need high-performance servers by discounting select servers by 50 percent. The price cuts have been taken in an effort to help the companies improve IT processes with an upgraded server or the purchase of multiple servers at a time of year when companies are closing out their fiscal year.
“This is the time of year businesses are looking at their bottom lines,” said Shelby Garlock, Director, Marketing for Codero. “We took deep price cuts on some of our most popular servers to help our customers keep their IT systems performing at their peak. We are glad to be able to offer this exceptional value at this time when there is a greater need for the discount.”
All servers in the Codero lineup are backed by:
• 99.9% uptime
• Experienced 24/7/365 technical support
• Helpful answers from Knowledge Base
• 100% powered green hosting
• Rewards point program
• Round the clock surveillance, security, network monitoring, and power backup systems
The basic foundation of any hosting environment is the server, but Codero also offers the ability to further customize server setups with other popular offerings including load balanced and clustered server network configurations.
For more information on the selection of servers at 50% off prices, visit www.codero.com.
About Codero
A resourceful Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, Codero creates flexible, scalable infrastructures using dedicated and managed hosting. All Codero services and products are backed by SAS 70 Type II secure data centers, live 24/7/365 U.S.-based support and a seasoned staff with international experience in the hosting business for over 15 years. An industry innovator, Codero has a customer loyalty Rewards Program and offers green hosting from the Phoenix, Arizona data center and four points of presence. For more information about Codero, please visit www.codero.com.
If you have any questions about my hosting experience, just ask.
In January, Laptoplogic.com submitted a guest post and I posted it. Since then, the post has seen a tremendous amount of traffic, most of it from StumbleUpon.com. The traffic the post has been bringing has been a nice increase from my normal numbers and I’ve been enjoying it. Yesterday was a whole new ball game.
What happened?
Yesterday morning, I was running through my morning routine, which includes a visit to by blog admin area to delete spam and approve valid comments, but it didn’t come up. Whenever this happens, my stomach turns just a little, then I check things out to see how bad it is. The first thing I do is SSH in and poke at logs, etc. This is what I saw:
Upon further inspection, I found that the server was trying to handle about 150 httpd requests per second. I looked at my stats page on MyBlogLog because there I can quickly see the source of a lot of traffic. The source was an article called “64 Things Every Geek Should Know“, which had over 1,200 diggs by time I saw it. The article linked to the guest post I mentioned above. It was the 5th of the 64 things.
Staying online
Keeping the site up was a bit of a struggle. I’m told that no single-server site can survive the “digg effect”, but I did everything I could to keep things going as smoothly as possible. Regardless, tons of people were met with database connection errors or just server timeouts as I tweaked whatever I could to make the server feed web pages to as many people as it could. At the peak of the traffic, I copied the popular post into a new static html page and redirected all traffic for that post. This was done to eliminate the overwhelming amount of MySQL database queries and additional http requests that were previously resulting from being within WordPress. This worked to some extent, but it just resulted in more people seeing less of the site and the server still struggled to keep up. With nothing more to do, I just monitored the server as best I could as I watched the article that linked to me hit the number two spot on the Digg.com homepage and surpass over 4,000 diggs pretty quickly.
Residual Effects
When an article hits the front page of Digg, a common side effect (on top of the surge of traffic) is a lot of inbound links from those Digg readers either on their own sites or in social media. For example, Guy Kawasaki posted the “64 Things” article link on his Twitter account with over 100,000 followers, it turned up in a tweet from @mashable (almost 500,000 followers), and according to Retweetist, he’s not the only one who tweeted it. In fact, according to Twitter’s real-time search, it’s been retweeted 20 times in just the last half hour. The numbers so far look like a little over 26,000 readers yesterday alone. That’s just a little more than my monthly unique reader count. Because I put the post in a flat html file without Google Analytics, I don’t have proper numbers for yesterday from Google, but I do have my local stats which show a clear rise in traffic:
To show the residual traffic effects, I’ll update this image tomorrow. So far, today’s traffic is looking way up still.
What I’ve learned
There’s one really important lesson I’ve learned from this, and it’s that I need to be much more prepared for the unexpected. This was just a link from a post that has hit the front page of digg. If it were an article on my site that hit the front page itself, the results would have been catastrophic to manage. As it is, the traffic received was far more than my server was prepared for. To prepare, I must find an appropriate solution that lets me still maintain just the one server (more than enough for normal operations), but that can somehow immediately live up to the performance needs of the Digg effect when it happens. My first thought was something like Aptana’s Cloud, but I want to talk to my current host first and feel out my options.
I just got an email inviting me to be a part of then next big Sedo/GreatDomains live domain name auction. Since this is the second domain related email for me today and I’ve been dealing with server moves (I have more sites to move, still), I decided to mention it and I’m going to let you bid on a few of my domains, too.
Premium Domains for Deep Pockets
GreatDomains is happy to announce another Premium Auction Event in the series of live auctions powered by Sedo. The auction will begin this Thursday, February 21st, at 2:00 EST, and will feature a great selection of premium domains, including Eggs.com, Autograph.com and FixedMortgages.com. This Premium Auction will close on Thursday, February 28th, at approximately 2:00 EST.
Is appartment.com really a premium domain? My picks are pda.net, telephone.net and vhs.net, even though they’re all .net. I’m wondering what happened to the premium domains I used to see on GreatDomains. Are they all gone? I’m sure you’ll still need money to get in the game, though. Maybe you should just scroll down and look at a couple of my names.
Buy one of my domains and save several thousand dollars
I have a bunch of domains, and I’d rather have some cash to put into other areas of online marketing, so I’m ready to sell a few domains. Not in the market? If you link to this post and someone from your link buys one of my domains, I’ll give you 20% (or you Entrecard members can opt for a flat 100 Entrecard credits instead of cash). Please note that some have half-finished sites on them and actual page rank. If you win one of those, you get the domain only, unless otherwise noted. Let’s get started, then.
- Bidding ends at midnight, March 1st, 2008.
- To bid, just comment below or email joe@joetech.com with the subject “Private bid” and I’ll enter your bid here. Note the amount you’re bidding and the domain.
- One bid per domain and one domain per bid, please, unless otherwise noted.
- If you bid and fail to follow through, I’ll make fun of you all over the interweb.
- Starting price or current bid in bold, but check the comments for newer bids before bidding.
- If you don’t understand a domain, google the keywords.
- If there’s a current bid, the next bid will be noted in parenthesis.
