Could The Diggeffect be the ultimate demise of Digg.com?

At the time of this writing, three of the fifteen links to stories on digg.com's front page resulted in pages that would not load. In other words, the digg effect had sent it's tidal wave over 20% of the servers hosting these stories. This problem does vary from time to time as there are days in which most of the front page stories are from large sites with plenty of bandwidth and then days where there are numerous stories from small sites with inadequate servers. I think today's three of fifteen is a pretty average occurrence.

This 20% of overwhelmed servers is completely manageable, albeit slightly frustrating. But what will happen in the future as digg continues to grow. Alexa.com is reporting that in the past three months, digg has grown in page views by 11%. What really needs to be considered however is that this problem is not isolated to only Digg. In fact, many of the front page stories on Digg will wind up on the "Popular" page of del.icio.us or the index page of Slashdot. In the spirit of full disclosure, it is important to mention that both del.icio.us and slashdot have seen a decline in page views by user as reported by Alexa. However, the proliferation of social networking sites only increases the chances of these stories being unreachable when linked on Digg's front page.

I started thinking of my own sites hosted on a very modest dedicated server and how they would handle the digg effect. The fact is, I haven't upgraded my server since 2004 because I simply have not had to. I asked a friend running a few sites off of a Celeron server and he mirrored my own thoughts. He has not upgraded in well over three years as well! Are other site owners keeping their servers upgraded? Judging by the number of unreachable sites on Digg at any given moment, I would guess that they are not.

As Digg continues to grow, it begs the question–could the ultimate success of Digg become its ultimate demise? Imagine for a moment that they aren't able to maintain their current 11% growth rate but instead drop to a sustainable 5%. That is still a phenomenal number of additional users clicking on these links and bombarding inadequate servers. If we take this a step further, we should expect to see many more unreachable sites hit the front page. If this is the case, at what point to Digg users simply get tired of clicking on interesting stories, only to find that they aren't able to view them? I can easily take three of fifteen sites being unreachable but at six or seven, I'd start rethinking visits to Digg.

I truly home that this doesn't happen. There are so many great sites on the web (too many for me to discover myself) and Digg.com offers a great way for me to stumble upon them. If people do not upgrade their hosting and Digg continues to grow, I am convinced we will see a sharp dip in Digg's traffic, perhaps even its demise.

Article written by Chris Farrugia who blogs about real estate in Florida.