webrampage

Hmm looks like Digg just got the “Digg effect”. You can never have enough bandwidth. Yeah that’s right folks. Digg is down. I’m not sure why. But, at first you couldn’t even load Digg and now they have a page with all their hot topics and the title of the page says “Digg will be back soon!”.

While we’re getting the site back up and running… check out the latest news before we took the site offline. If there are updates during this outage we’ll keep you informed on the Digg Blog. Thanks for your patience!

Okay so its confirmed that Digg ran out of bandwidth. Or maybe that’s not the reason. I can’t tell what’s going on. I’ll look around and update you guys. So, stick around!

Oh and here’s a screenshot of the “Digg will be back soon” page.

Update (10 mins later): Digg is back up again. Yay!

Update again: Looks like Digg’s acting as if it never happened. I emailed them. No reply. Checked their blog. No post about this. Oh well.

I thought why not write a quick post about how to get some visitors from Google Knol. Well Knol launched last week and it isn’t so popular yet. Here’s our chance to take advantage of it!

Okay first of all, lets clear things up. Don’t expect a rush of traffic from Knol (like the “Digg effect”). So here are the things you need to know:

Go write a Knol

Are you thinking about what you should write? Well write about the things you’re good at. Like I wrote a Knol about resellers. Find out what you’re pro at and the write about it. Just don’t spam and make sure the quality of the content is good.

Add a few backlinks

Go to my Knol about resellers. See how I added a backlink to my blog? Do that in your own Knol. Make sure the links are relevant to the Knol and try to keep the number of backlinks low (so it doesn’t look spammy). Plus you can also hyperlink a few words on your Knol to your site (keep it relevant!).

When should you start writing?

ASAP! Knol is pretty new right now and there aren’t a lot of Knols. So, you should take advantage of it. People will see your article, rate it high (if they like it) and then later on (hopefully) more people will read yours instead of the newer Knols on the same topic.

Why should you do this?

Well people noticed that Knols are ranking high in SERPs. Now that’s good for us. Jack some traffic! Your Knol ranks high, you threw in a few backlinks, people see your Knol and they check out the links. Tada! Simple as that.

Plus don’t forget you can also make a few bucks from Knol. You can link your AdSense account to Knol and get the revenue from the ads displayed on your Knol. So, there we go another reason to invest a few minutes in Knol.

This is even better than “Digg effect”

I’m not joking. You only stay on Digg’s front page for a few hours and you get about 15K visitors on average (and it crashes your server). On Knol, you’ll be up there forever (and no server crash!). No one’s taking you off, buddy. There is no front page that will take you off after a few hours and make you say goodbye to the huge traffic wave.

In my opinnion, this would be great way to get some long-term traffic. Writing a Knol doesn’t take you that long. I wrote my first one in about 10-15 minutes. Well good luck and let us know if it worked for you.

Oh man my small VPS is getting raped by these traffic spikes. I need to upgrade or use caching plugins. Well I’ll figure something out. Okay so I was wondering the other day, how overselling started. Like how overselling grew and finally stopped at the unlimited space/bandwidth plans. I did some research and got the answers.

It looks like overselling started back in 2005. I couldn’t find out which company started it though. But, it did look like BlueHost started it all (damn you BlueHost!). Again this is might not be right. We’ll never know who came up with this “brilliant idea”.

2005

A few hosts (ex: BlueHost, PowWeb) are overselling the bandwidth, only. They’re overselling upto 100GB of bandwidth. Still not bad. Just trying to beat the competition (by lying a bit).

2006 (early)

Hosts aren’t happy. They want to oversell the bandwidth a bit more. On average its around 100GB to 300GB bandwidth. A few hosts (ex: BlueHost) are offering upto 15GB space though.

2006 (mid-late)

This is where it gets better. I mean for those greedy hosts. Bad for us, of course. Hosts such as PowWeb are offering upto 20GB of space and 400GB of bandwidth. PowWeb’s probably saying in your face, BlueHost! Oh wait. BlueHost is offering 50GB of space and 999GB of bandwidth.

Woah. Holy shit! DreamHost is offering 1TB of bandwidth. There we go. We’ve found our leader in bandwidth overselling.

2007

Okay here’s where we get our 100% oversold plans (aka the “modern overselling”). DreamHost is offering 200GB of space and 2TB of bandwidth (and so is HostGator). What are they thinking? We’re not complete idiots. Enough overselling!

Oh no. Its not enough. BlueHost wants to kick the competition’s ass by offering 300GB space and 3TB of bandwidth.

2008 (early)

Yay 2008! Everything’s pretty much the same as 2007 right now. Everyone is offering 300GB space and 3TB bandwidth. Now lets fast forward a few months. Hosts are offering 1500GB space and 15TB bandwidth. Which greedy bastard came up with this? I think it was PowWeb. There are no archives of 2008 on the Wayback Machine yet. But, I remember PowWeb offering it first.

A few hosts are offering unlimited space and bandwidth too (oh crap!).

2008 (mid)

This is where things get totally screwed. Now most of the oversellers (PowWeb, BlueHost, etc) are switching over to the unlimited plans. This is where we’re at, right now.

Who started it all?

Well to me it looks like BlueHost and PowWeb were the masterminds behind this. But, hey I didn’t go around checking every single host. I only checked the leading oversellers.

Over to you

I hope you guys learnt a bit on how overselling grew. This isn’t very accurate, but still, you get the idea. Well go ahead and drop a comment on what you think about overselling and if you have any idea where overselling really started from.

Don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email, if you’ve enjoyed this. And lastly, I would like to say “thank you” to the hosts that completely destroyed changed the hosting industry with the idea of overselling.