My blog is dead.
It was hugged to death by a Reddit post talking about Lake Powell's water level being so low that junk which is usually underwater is now fully exposed. Like a boat that sank. A comment on the Reddit post had a link to a Blogography post where I had a photo of the same boat 15 years ago...
And since I pay for the cheapest web hosting available, I don't have the bandwidth available to deal with such a massive amount traffic. Which means my blog just kind of shut down under the pressure of it all. Somebody had to post a link to the page cache on the Internet Wayback Machine.
In an attempt to (maybe?) head off such a thing in the future, I installed a plugin called "Simply Static" which is supposed to help by generating static pages so WordPress doesn't have to generate it every time it's requested. Not sure how it works since WordPress still gets the request and has to reroute it to the correct page via the plugin, but I guess it's worth a shot.
Heaven only knows that a resource as critical as Blogography should stay running at all costs.
On the bright side, getting the "Reddit Hug of Death" did get me an opportunity to upload a higher resolution shot that looks much better, so I guess there's that.
UPDATE: I couldn't get my Simply Static site to work properly, so I ended up reinstalling WP Super Cache. Maybe it will work this time around? I had to remove it a couple years ago because videos wouldn't play. Maybe that's been fixed.
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What it is to be popular!
Another option you can use is Cloudflare to cache the data so they end up bearing the load of spiked traffic like this.
As long as you don’t need too many complicated rules (which I doubt you would) it’s free of charge and easy to do and gives you added DDOS protection too.
Cloudflare came free with my hosting and I enabled it… only to be sucked into an absolute nightmare where my site was never responsive and wouldn’t load for anybody not logged in. It took weeks for me to get everything removed and untangled from Cloudflare, and I just decided to let the chips fall where they may. And boy did they!😀