Developer and blogger Craig Junghandel had a 4,500% increase in visitors after being featured on Reddit, for example, and CodinGame’s platform had two hours of downtime after a Hug of Death. There aren’t many statistics available on the Reddit Hug of Death, but some website owners have taken to their blogs to share their experiences. That last possibility is particularly likely if the site is on a shared server. A site may reach its traffic quota, its data bandwidth might be insufficient, or its server could become overloaded. The reason a crash might happen after a Reddit Hug of Death varies from case to case. If the smaller site isn’t set up to handle high traffic levels, a crash could occur. The Reddit Hug of Death, also known as the Slashdot Effect, occurs when a popular site links to a smaller site, sending it a large (and sudden) influx of visitors. Next up, we’ll look at one of those causes. While some factors are outside of your control (such as those where your hosting provider is at fault), others can be defended against. Some common causes include a sudden influx of visitors, bugs in your website’s code, or a loss of power to your server. In order to prevent these periods of downtime before they happen, you’ll need to put safety measures in place to cover the various reasons for site crashes. Generally speaking, anything that causes a site to stop serving data will result in a crash.

Then we’ll explain how to avoid a site crash altogether. In this post, we’ll explain the various reasons websites crash, including the Reddit Hug of Death (also known as the Slashdot Effect). You’ll then be able to focus your attention on other important tasks, and feel comfortable in the knowledge that users can access your site with ease. On the other hand, preventing such a crash can save you time, energy, and even money by minimizing site downtime. Getting a site up and running again can be time consuming, and users won’t be able to access your content in the meantime.

If your site is tied to your income, that scenario becomes even more problematic. If you own a website, having it crash is probably one of your worst nightmares. Posted in Performance, Scalability, Uptime by Samantha Rodriguez

Reddit megasync safe