Last Thursday, I posted the animated CSS Homer, and it was a big hit. Friday morning, it was popular on Digg (over 3000 diggs). The resulting Digg effect was enough for my hosting provider to shut off my site.

I was a cheapskate when I bought my hosting plan from TotalChoice Hosting, looking only for low cost. Their reaction seemed aggravatingly uninformed. The support guy kept referring to the traffic spike as “an attack”. I tried to explain that it was in fact a success, and that they had failed to help me deal with that success. I could understand needing to protect their widely shared servers, but at least they could speak knowledgeably about the event.

He also called it a DDOS, which it was, but only if it stands for Distributed Desirability Of Stuff.

Further angering me was the fact that my email was unavailable, since they simply shut off my entire account. Also, there was a misconfiguration in the 403 page they were serving, so the traffic logs showed every request resulting in another request for a non-existent 403.shtml page. TotalChoice will be the first to point out that they are not the right service for a high-traffic site, but they should at least be conversant in the language of their newly disappointed customers, and know how to correctly shut off accounts.

Saturday morning, the traffic had subsided and the site was reactivated, and I figured I could spend some time researching options for a new provider. Slicehost seemed good if I wanted to go the VPS route, though sysadmin is not my interest or forte, so I was leery of taking on all the responsibility for the machine, however virtual it was.

WebFaction seemed the best choice of the shared providers, with supported Django, and many Django sites hosted.

I was away for the weekend, so I wasn’t actively working on the problem. My site was up, I could now plan my next move.

At least, until I got slashdotted. Now the site was really shut down, and TotalChoice wasn’t too pleased. The only way back online was with a new provider. WebFaction got the gig, because I don’t need complete control over a machine. A shared account with shell access and supported Django would be great. I looked in their forum for Digg effect issues, and saw intelligent conversation. I had dropped them a line outlining my situation, and they made clear that they had dealt with it before and would work with me if such good fortune arose again, but that they would shut down sites if it was the only way to protect the shared servers. In a way, that last caveat reassured me. If they had made a blanket claim that their servers were Digg-proof, it would have smelled of naive or dishonest admins.

Monday I signed up, switched over my domains nameservers, re-uploaded my site, and I was back online. After getting TotalChoice to reactivate my old site, I transferred the blog comments, and now everything should be back as good as new.

It would have been nice to survive the Digg and Slashdotting. Maybe with WebFaction I will next time. I’ve got a new appreciation for slimming down the server needs of my blog. The avatars in comments are something to think about: the Homer post has 70 comments, meaning each page load also generates 70 image requests. One possibility is to offload the image to another service.

The irony in all this is that although I started with TotalChoice because of how inexpensive they were, I’m not paying much more for the WebFaction account.