A few days ago, my post, “11 Powerful Firefox 3 Add-ons That Can Replace Standalone Applications” reached the front page of multiple social media sites which sent a massive amount of traffic to my blog in a relatively short amount of time. With a quality web host and reliable analytics, the site was accessible throughout the burst of traffic and I have unbroken reports to show for.

Social Traffic

The post racked up some impressive numbers for traffic for three of the most popular social media sites. Overall, Digg sent me 61,722 uniques, Reddit was next with 30,231 then del.icio.us brang up the rear with 2,210. Two other sites that sent a significant amount of visitors were StumbleUpon with 5,519 and PopURLs at 2,078. The remained miscellaneous traffic accounts for the over 125,000 unique visitors to the post in four days.

In regards to Digg, I recieved 2470 diggs to the post, which in itself, generated more traffic because it was listed in the “popular in last 24 hours” and “popular this week” sections of the Tech News category.

The post has 977 saves on Del.icio.us at the moment. That is the most I have ever received in one post. I am still receiving traffic on the “popular” pages of related tags.

Hosting

This was my first time to the front page of the social sites while being hosted on Media Temple’s Grid Server hosting. I was honestly impressed with the servers staying up almost 100% of time during the flood of traffic. The site did go down for about fifteen minutes. At that time, the MySQL tables were served from a “BurstContainer”, which allows the blog to scale during the surge. It seemed to work fine. Aside from the fifteen minutes I was able to access any part of the blog with a long wait time.

Analytics

I have abandoned Google Analytics over a year ago and have been exclusively using Clicky web analytics. The real-time statistics essential for monitoring traffic and visitor interaction. For as much traffic as the blog was receiving, I didn’t know if there would be a break in reporting for the analytics. Turns out there was not. I have full statistics and bunch of reports to dissect.

Backlinks

According to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, the post has 2,272 “inlinks” at the time of this publish. I am still sifting through those numbers to clear of the redundant and invalid entries, so I don’t have a solid number as of yet.

Disappointments

Even though, I “front paged” the big three social media sites, I was expecting a few others as well. The post was submitted to Fark.com, but it wasn’t good enough to be green lit even though 65 premium members clicked on the post. I have had posts go green with less than 20 visits. Propeller did not do that well at all. I got 10 total visitors from them. Lastly, Mixx.com sent me 3 only visitors.

Pleasant Surprises

I didn’t know that Reddit posts appeared on Wired.com’s home page. People were more impressed by that because they didn’t know about Digg, del.icio.us, etc.

The post seemed to get international attention also. It was linked to on German, Spanish, Polish, Israeli, and Croatian languages.

Two developers of the mentioned add-ons made comments. It was good opportunity to thank them for the great work they have done.