Talk Social Bookmarking

I have a strong dedicated server running under both creativebits and Ads of the World, so I didn’t have this problem. They held up perfectly without any slowdown. Of course I was lucky that with Ads of the World I got dugg on a weekend, so the normal traffic was relatively low. Shared servers in general will not survive digg or they will slow down so much it becomes a hassle. Load balanced servers have a good chance for survival and well set-up dedicated servers are the best of course.

Optimize your page

Even if you have good hosting, you should make sure your site’s engine is ready to take the many thousands of hits per hour. Up to 50K page loads an hour. Most dynamic websites use lot of CPU cycles to serve a page. If your server’s CPU runs at 100% and the memory gets full, your server will start using the HD as a scratch disk. This will further slow down everything. Eventually all will crash and your server will become unresponsive. Effectively your site suffers a DOS attack.

Every site engine works in different ways and the process I described is a crude description of what actually happens between apache, php, mysql, HD, memory and CPU. What you should remember is that you need to optimize the page. Of course I’m not suggesting hacking the engine, as it requires serious programming knowledge. But you can get rid of all the unnecessary bells and whistles easily.

Some engines like Drupal has the feature to switch on different levels of page caching and throttling which greatly reduces the load for anonymous users (readers who are not logged in). Avoid blocks with dynamic content on your pages or switch them off if you’re expecting to hit the digg home page. Optimize your images and CSS files, so they take less time to serve as well.

You can also use the page cache within wordpress. 

OR

Use the Digg Defender
 

Accelerate PHP

If you can install a php accelerator such as eaccelerator. If you don’t know how, ask your hosting company or a specialist if they can do it for you.

Now make your site accessible and easy to read.  Get the digg-digg plugin if you have wordpress to allow a digg button right next to your content.  Do a shout out to your digg network, and sit back and prey your site doesn’t get blasted.

PS.  You may get a lot of traffic, but don’t expect much from Adsense because digg users want to read content and not click on ads.