Reddit took down my website!

Yup - I woke up Saturday to find the message above when I visited my website. I’ve used Primus (Planet Domain) for the past 8 years as a hosting provider, and I’ve never had any issues whatsoever - including reaching my bandwidth cap.

For starters, I was a little concerned, so I logged into my cpanel and checked out the AWSTATS first:

Holy crap! Did I just get too much traffic this month? I have been doing a lot of linking to my site from twitter for Game On 2.0 at the Ontario Science Centre. So I decided to view the day-by-day bandwidth:

I just had a massive surge in bandwidth between Friday and Saturday! Was this a denial of service attack (DoS) of some type? I decided to check who was hitting my website by looking at what page(s) they were getting, and I noticed it was all the same page:

Basically, that’s a page describing the famous “no fire cheat” mystery of the arcade game Galaga. So next, I have to see who is hitting me - was it random hosts (e.g. a distributed DoS attack), or a referral from some website? When I checked the latest visitors, I found that nearly all of the hits came as referrals from a post on Friday night from Reddit.com:

So, I checked out the post and found a link to my web page in the comment section alongside people saying that they couldn’t get to it:

So, basically, someone linked to a blog post of mine from Reddit, and because it went viral on Reddit, it used up all of my bandwidth in less than 3 hours! Wow. That’s a first for me.

I’m not mad at all - after all, I actually want people to link to my pages and enjoy my posts.

Worse yet, Primus (Planet Domain) doesn’t offer an unlimited bandwidth plan I can upgrade to, so I made the decision to switch to GoDaddy (which has been awesome for our triOS Dev Blog) - it basically costs the same, but has more storage and unlimited bandwidth and faster performance too! Plus, GoDaddy has amazing 24/7 customer support. Nothing against Primus - they’ve been great for the past many years. But I don’t want a simple Reddit link (or otherwise) to use up all my monthly bandwidth and lock me out. And today, that is getting more and more possible than ever before. GoDaddy, here I come!

UPDATE:

I no longer host on GoDaddy (we migrated later to a VM running Linux that I manage).