The bitter-sweet pleasure of being digged

28.1.2007 | Filed Under Blog

Tags: Blog, cell-phone-game, digg, digg-effect, mobicritic, mobile-game-review

Nope, this is not another post of the “I’ve been digged” series. Well, it is, kinda, but it’s also a public apology. Mine, Mobicritic’s administrator. Ours, Mobicritic’s editors.

Just like any other blogger, ever since starting Mobicritic.com two months ago, I dreamt of getting Digged. Tens of thousands of people running into our site at once and enjoying the extremely cool mobile games reviews over here.

Yesterday my dream came true. One passionate reader bookmarked us, and hundreds of others loved us. One of Mobicritic’s latest articles, the one about the top 5 games that you could play over and over again got BIG and made the first page of Digg.

I was looking, my eyes filled with joy and a stupid smile on the lips, as swarms of visitors barged right in. The online visitors counter kept growing and growing: 40, 60, 80 simultaneous connections.

Then hell started to break loose, as more people around the globe read the Digg news. And the stupid smile became a rictus: the website went slower and slower, then it died.

Our hosting is a shared hosting environment, over at Dreamhost. It should work. But it didn’t, and that’s my fault: I hadn’t tested that the wp-cache plugin that allegedly protects wordpress-powered websites from crashing works. It didn’t.

Sorry to all of you great readers, who came here yesterday only to find an empty page. Sorry to all of you who came all the way here only to find a static snapshot of a digg mirror. I did my best trying to deal with this unforeseeable situation. And for all the inconvenients I apologize.

Come back, bookmark this mobile review e-zine/blog or, even better, subscribe to it. It’s free, it’s written by passionate bloggers and gamers, and provides you with the best insights on the industry news, what games to play on the go, what software to install on your mobile phone, smartphone or handheld.

Once again, we are sorry. Please forgive us.

PS. I’m writing this almost 12 hours later, 11 Dreamhost support emails, one night of staying awake and plenty of coffees later. The problems generated by the bad configuration of the system should have been fixed by now and everything should work fine. Hopefully. If you still meet some 503 blank pages while browsing the site, that’s probably Dreamhost’s fault; just refresh the browser window and it should work. It you run into other problems, please give us a message: office at mobicritic dot com
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[tags]mobicritic, mobile game review, cell phone game, digg effect, digg[/tags]