Making it to the front page of Digg is exciting, but the massive invasion of new visitors can cripple or crash your site. One of the most important things you’ll need to survive a Digg is the support of a good host. Here are 5 that fit the bill.

1. TypePad:

If you want to host a blog, TypePad is the way to go. They are a part of the Six Apart group, which in addition to TypePad includes Vox, LiveJournal, and the Movable Movable Type publishing platform. TypePad promises to “work tirelessly” to give good service. They host extremely popular blogs like The Dilbert Blog and Cute Overload. If they can host the daily traffic on those sites, they can certainly manage yours in a Digg situation. If you run into trouble, they provide support seven days a week, 365 days of the year.TypePad is conscious of bandwidth needs. A Support Knowledge Base article concerning bandwidth limits assures users that content will not be affected in the event that an account goes over bandwidth limits. They’ll let you know if you’re in excess of your limit and work with you to find a solution to the problem. What’s even better is, for the time being, TypePad will not charge you overage fees. They plan to do so in the future, however. If you continually go over on your bandwidth, they’ll get you set up with an upgrade for your account.

TypePad offers three account levels as well as custom-priced business class. The basic level includes 2GB of bandwidth each month for $49.50 a year, the plus level offers 5GB of bandwidth each month for $89.50 a year and the pro level gives 10GB of bandwidth a month for $149.50 a year.

2. Media Temple Grid Hosting:

Media Temple is a different kind of hosting company. They use grid hosting over shared server and short path bandwidth whenever possible. The best part? They give you 1 terabyte of short path bandwidth. Yes, that’s 1,000GB.

Media Temple’s highly effective alternative to shared servers, grid hosting, is unique. Instead of putting your entire site on one server that’s prone to bad neighbor traffic spikes and hardware failures, Media Temple uses on-demand scalability with literally hundreds of servers at once, eliminating the chance that your website will become overloaded. It’s built to handle spikes and surges like the Digg effect. In the rare circumstance that your usage hits extremely severe levels, they will shut down your site; however, you can call ahead of time to have this preventative measure taken off of your account. 99.97% of the sites that they host never exceed their bandwidth allocation.

Media Temple doesn’t slack off on support, either. They promise 24/7/365 customer support and challenge you to call them on New Year’s Day at 3 AM. 90% of their staff is dedicated in some way to support functions, so they’ll be there when you need them. Hosting with Media Temple’s grid is $20 per month.

3. Rackspace:

Rackspace offers award-winning managed hosting with Fanatical Support. Their Managed Hosting and Zero-Downtime Network offers an enterprise-grade solution that’s sure to hold up during a Digg.

Rackspace’s Zero-Downtime Network has a 100% network uptime guarantee. They use only high-performance bandwidth and nine different network providers to create redundancies in data flow. Additionally, Rackspace offers load balancing as an add-on if Digg overloads your server. What really sets Rackspace apart is its Managed Hosting. Rackspace assigns a dedicated team to your server with 24/7/365 support. This is especially important for the Digg effect because you know you’ll have someone keeping an eye on your server even if you’re not.

Of course, Rackspace’s excellent hosting and service comes at a high cost. Plans are individually quoted and rumored to start around $400 per month. It’s an investment, but you’ll sleep well without nightmares of a Digg taking down your site.

4. Survive Digg:

Survive Digg’s name says it all. This web hosting company is a new division of Brius Web Hosting that guarantees you’ll survive the Digg effect. They’ve come through for clients like Tutorial Ninjas and promise to do the same for you.

Survive Digg offers “Survival Kits” with features and tools aimed at helping you get on Digg and keep your website up. They use top of the line servers with custom optimized apache, php, mysql and kernel. Each server is assigned limited accounts.

Most importantly, Survive Digg guarantees 100% uptime during a Digg storm. Survive Digg offers around the clock support from an in-house team. This staff of experienced web developers, webmasters and business owners is available 24/7/365. Survive Digg’s monthly hosting is currently $35.

5. Freebies:

There are a few free web services that can weather the storm as well. WordPress and Google-owned Blogger are two of the best. Hoever, even though these hosts are dependable, you’ll miss out on useful features that are available with paid services.

Blogger’s status as a part of Google ensures that you’ll stay up. Unfortunately, the benefits more or less end there. Unlike other blogging software, Blogger doesn’t offer domain names, statistics or spam catchers. But you’ll survive Digg, for free. WordPress is another decent free host. Unlike Blogger, WordPress has a domain name service, non-blog pages, stats and a nifty tool called WP-Cache. WP-Cache does exactly what you think it does: it caches your blog pages so that you can serve them up faster and thus avoid crashing while you’re on the front page of Digg. These free hosts are effective, but you’ll do better by going with a paid host. They give you more flexibility, plus you don’t want your Digg visitors to think you’re a cheapo, do you?

Staff :: Jun.13.2007 :: Features :: Comments Off