Content Delivery Network

Upgrade your hosting to withstand DIGG effect

Nearly all webmasters fear the "Digg effect" but there is a simple way to overcome the negative aspects. Using a Content Delivery Network is a very easy way to save bandwidth on static files and withstand the Digg effect much better than hosting all files from a single-location. By funneling much of the static content and information on your site through a Content Delivery Network, the amount of bandwidth used by your site will drastically .

A key to understanding how to beat the Digg effect is understanding what the Digg effect actually is. Generally, the Digg effect refers to high traffic and web visitors directed to your site caused by a popular post on a large website such as Digg. Very popular posts always generate thousands of views, and direct thousands of visitors to the site that cripples under the heavy load, usually going down.

A Content Delivery Network can help overcome the complexity of the Digg effect. A large portion of any website are images, pdf files, and other static files. These static items load each time a user loads the page and can use considerable amounts of bandwidth, network stack and server resources. Moving static file serving from your site to a Content Delivery Network can free up lots of bandwidth and even speed up your website. Content Delivery Network will serve files to website viewers from multiple cache nodes located in different locations, making it faster to load the webpage. The good news about Content Delivery Networks is that usually bandwidth is cheaper than with standard web hosting because Content Delivery Network (CDN) buys bandwidth in very large commit rates, thus getting very low bandwidth pricing.

Moving your content to a Content Delivery Network is also very simple. The existing file structure will remain completely intact, this way everything will still function as it normally would. All dynamic content or information will remain on your current hosting or dedicated server, while any static content must be moved to CDN system and referred with a different sub-domain. Paying for actual data transfer is generally the best for high peak time and traffic burst web sites and blogs, comparing to 95% billing based on Mbps.

Any website is vulnerable to the Digg effect, and nearly all are likely to experience it at some time unless you run a very unpopular web site or blog. By using a Content Delivery Network you can prepare your site for traffic bursts. Content Delivery Networks are a relatively inexpensive to prevent the Digg effect.