For the first time, this site was on the receiving end of what I know as the Slashdot Effect and is today more commonly known as the Hug of Death. This is when some bit of your content becomes wildly popular and all of a sudden you get hit with a volume of traffic that you’d never seen before. Let’s unpack what happened.
The post in question was posted on Friday. For most of that first day it did what my posts usually do, which is a handful of readers an hour, largely driven by social media posts from LinkedIn or Mastodon. Then at 11:00pm, it suddenly became popular. In the space of a single hour the traffic went from seven visitors to a hundred, and then to 2,000.
The traffic doesn’t really ramp up slowly, it’s more like a light switch. One hour you are unknown, the next you are on the front page of Hacker News and the internet is pouring through your door.
It held there for six hours. From midnight to six in the morning the site took between 1,700 and 2,400 visitors an hour.
I wasn’t even aware that any of this was happening until a friend pinged me on Saturday to say I was on the front page of Hacker News.
Then it decayed, cleanly, halving roughly every five or six hours through the day. By evening it was a trickle. By the next morning there was still a bit of incoming traffic from Hacker News, but it was effectively over.
Who were these people? Almost none of them were my target market. Twenty thousand of them had never visited before. They came from 139 different countries, and 99% of them read the one thing they came for and left, most inside a minute. I know what countries they were in, but not how most of them got here: 70% of the visits carried no usable referral source at all, stripped away by mobile apps and privacy settings.
The good news is that my site didn’t fall over. I’ve deliberately kept the site very simple with static pages being served out of an S3 bucket and behind a CloudFront CDN, and this was able to handle the load without significant problems.
The one place it did struggle a bit was somewhere I had been lazy. The post used a single image that I hadn’t optimized for size and that was still about a megabyte. On an ordinary day, serving that to a few dozen people costs effectively nothing. Serving it 22,000 times is another matter. So optimizing my image assets is now on my TODO list.
So what’s the end result? 22,000 visitors, and not one of them booked a call or signed up for anything. A small handful clicked through to a second linked post. The rest evaporated.
Which just goes to reinforce the point that visitor count isn’t the metric we care about. If nobody engages then it doesn’t matter how many people saw it.