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It’s probably every webmasters dream to have his or her site featured on the front page of Digg. A lot of website owners, however, still have nightmares about the day they got Dugg. The avalanche of visitors hitting your site can cause a number of bad things to happen.

Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and
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Most hosting providers and domain registrars hide stuff they don’t want you to know about in their “general terms and conditions”, “terms of service” or “acceptable use policy” you agree on those when you sign up for their service. It’s that 40 page long document you scroll thru to click the “I agree” checkbox at the bottom.

Some domain registrars have high fees to transfer your domain to another registrar. easyspace.com, for example, charges $22 to transfer your domain or $37 to change the owner! Their 45 page long Terms & Conditions includes:

You agree that you may not transfer a domain name registration to another domain name registrar during the first sixty (60) days from the effective date of the initial domain name registration with us. After that time, you may transfer your domain name registration to a third party domain name registrar of your choice, subject to our then-current policies and procedures incorporated herein by reference.

Note the marked part! Basically they can add whatever they want after you have agreed! Read more »

Once you have your domain name registered, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Hosting accounts come in many forms and sizes. Think about what you want to put on your website, so you can get a hosting account that can handle the task. My preferred blog software is WordPress, which needs php and MySQL running on the server, other software packages might require a windows server and asp. Make sure you know exactly what type of hosting you need before signing up for one.

A server running on Linux is usually cheaper, because it doesn’t require an expensive software license like Windows servers. Php and MySQL are also free to run unlike Microsoft’s SQL server.

Another option would be to host your website at home, but I would not recommend it, even if you have the knowledge to run your own server. No matter how well you manage your server, there are tons of things that can go wrong and bring your website down. When things go wrong it is usually when you are not there to fix it, preferably when you just left for a long weekend away. When you sign up for a hosting account, the hosting provider will look after the server and make sure your website is accessible day and night.