What A Slashdotting Means

On Saturday, my other site, Trustic, was Slashdotted. It was the top story for 3 hours or so, I’m told. Fantastic. You always hear about the ‘Slashdot effect’, of how it funnels so much traffic to linked sites, that they go down in a steaming pile of dead server hardware. Well, that didn’t happen to Trustic. Between Saturday evening and 11:59pm Sunday night, Trustic served about 36,000 pages. Not hits, pages. And the vast majority of those were database driven, not static. Served without a hitch. I was even in Santa Cruz, away from the computer, when it happened. Am I a genius? Some super server architect? I doubt it, although I do have some experience in that area with groups. I get the impression that the majority of sites that Slashdot links to are run off of DSL or modem lines. It does take a certain amount of bandwidth to deal with a slashdotting. But bandwidth is getting very, very cheap these days. I used to say that hardware was free but bandwidth was expensive. That’s no longer the case. There are definite advantages to working in the ‘post-bubble’ world.