BloodFrontier FOSS FPS Gets Slashdotted

What does it mean to get "Slashdotted"?

If you have been online for a decent amount of time, you probably know about the news site for geeks called Slashdot.

From this, you may surmise that getting "Slashdotted" involves getting your site linked to in an article on Slashdot, resulting in a significant increase in your site traffic.

You would be correct. Very correct.

You may also surmise that this increase in traffic results in a corresponding increase in sales/leads/etc.

You would be incorrect, most of the time. Especially so in the case of recent FOSS FPS developer BloodFrontier, who got their mention posted on Slashdot today. What all too many businesses fail to take into account is the hardware limitations of the server that hosts their website.

That's right, hardware limitations. What getting "Slashdotted" really means is that your website was unprepared for the amount of traffic that flows through a site as popular as Slashdot. BloodFrontier's website is currently inaccessible.

It's the equivalent of playing "catch" with a kid that has a grudge and his hands on the control of a batting cage ball-pitcher. It starts off exciting, becomes farcical, then turns ugly when you start catching pitches with the wrong body parts. Eventually, you are reduced to a bruised pile of flesh, writhing on the ground until the child gets bored and finds something else to torture.

The reason that sites like Slashdot link so often to major news outlets is that major news outlets are prepared for the level of traffic that results. Indeed, they are typically poised to bank on it as much as possible.

Several years ago, I read something posted by Tycho and Gabe over on Penny Arcade about how they would like for people to not take it personally when they do not bother to post about this or that company or product being promoted by a friend. It isn't personal. Most people just don't have the hardware infrastructure to support the amount of resulting traffic.

Penny Arcade may seem like a simple online comic website, but that thing gets more traffic than you can possibly imagine. The result is that it requires it's own small server farm just to stay online.

You may mean well with your aspirations of grandeur for your business or website, but learn to grow; don't assume you can jump straight to the top unless you are either prepared for a fall or have mitigated your hardware burden through the use of a server cluster or (perhaps) a "cloud" environment.

If all you have is one dedicated server, work on promoting via channels that promise less traffic. Just because you have a dedicated server doesn't mean you are ready for the "big time" just yet.

What you want to do is build your traffic across smaller channels until you are pushing the limits of your single dedicated server. Once you require an expansion in your online hardware infrastructure, you will have a better idea of how much traffic you are ready for.

For a comparison, a certain client site gets over one million raw page views per month and it is beginning to slow the server down. That site is primed to expand into a clustered environment.

Another idea, for those of you at home scheming about how to make use of this knowledge: major traffic sites link to other sites that CAN handle the traffic. If provided a new alternative that they can link to, they almost inevitably WILL link to it. It's just a pet theory of mine, but the logic plays out if you've been following along.

Bottom line, no matter how great the idea of that much traffic sounds, you probably do not want to get "Slashdotted"...