My Blog Post Went Viral – And It Was Awful

A cautionary tale from Vikki, Director of Marketing.

I know what you’re thinking. How could going viral be bad? Internet Famous? Awesome! Well it can be awful if you’re not prepared.

The story begins with a conversation I had with a friend about how certain people just don’t understand boating etiquette. I gathered up a few ideas and wrote them out on my personal blog. Before this, my blog was just family recipes and some ranting type things and didn’t think much about it. Even though I’ve owned this domain for years I really didn’t start tinkering with something new on it until 3 months ago. It was mostly for my friends to read and I thought it would be fun.

When I posted the boating article, it got 1,500 visitors in 4 days. I was thrilled. Fast forward a month later. I got a notice to moderate a comment and… whoa 120 people read the post in one day long after I posted! The next day 11,000. I was shocked! It was about this time I thought, I should monetize this with ads! And here begins my cautionary tale.

1. As soon as I thought it, I should have monetized. You’ll see why in a moment.
2. I started using more memory and bandwidth than I had allotted for that domain and my page was not being served to my demanding fans.
3. Adjustments to my domain package weren’t enough. I went over my allotted usage and my site was suspended!

Suspended? How? Well the hosting option I had chosen was not fit for the traffic I received. I had received hundreds of thousands of unique visitors in just a few hours. Once you breach what your package offers in terms of memory, you’re in danger of affecting others if you’re on a shared machine. So basically you get put in a corner to calm down. At this point I’m desperately trying to set up an Ad Sense account and guess what? It can take 1 -3 days for you to be verified, and ads to start showing and making you money. And you can’t do anything about this until your site is back online. What’s a girl to do?? Upgrade of course!

Take my advice everyone. If you are growing quickly or are witty and articulate and poised to go viral, upgrade your server!

Luckily for me, I work for HostDime and all of the smartest and best server people are on the other side of the conference room and I was able to swiftly adjust to my newfound popularity.  You my friends, are merely a phone call, live chat, or ticket away from these same awesome folks. (I’m positive you won’t get the same ribbing I did for getting suspended, I’m supposed to know better.)

So here’s the takeaway here:

1. I had no idea this would happen. If you know you have a big event or promotion or an expected increase in traffic, please talk to us. We can give you options to help you manage demand.
2. Consider adding WP Super Cache if you have a WordPress site.
3. Monetize now. Consider an affiliate link to HostDime, we pay up to $150 per sale!
4. Upgrade now. Don’t wait until you are in freak out mode, because that’s when you make bad decisions. Check out our dedicated servers! 
5. Go check your allotments on your package. Are you getting near the tipping point? Adjust as necessary. This is also a good indicator of a need to upgrade.

Now that I’ve got everything in order, I’m going to sit back and wait for my little side project do it’s thing.

Vikki Fraser is the Director of Marketing for HostDime.com, Inc. and has been a reseller herself for 14 years. Let us know if you have any questions by sharing your comments in the box below, or by sounding off on our Facebook Page or by tweeting us at @HostDime.