Make your blog “Digg Proof” with caching plugins

Many blogs achieve some measure of success by having an article featured on the front page of Digg, Slashdot or other social bookmarking website.

All too often though, the procedure goes like this:

• You publish an article
• Your article is featured on Digg ( hooray )
• Your site is then, what could only be called assaulted, by an enormous amount of simultaneous visitors ( hooray ? )
• Your web hosts SQL server then crashes ( not hooray… ) resulting in your website and the websites of anyone sharing your SQL server to go offline.
• You’re then contacted by the unhappy technical support person from your web hosting company who is responsible for fixing the server you just broke.

The ability of your blog to withstand such traffic will primarily depend on your hosting arrangement, whether you have dedicated or shared hosting, and various other factors. There is however something to help you survive, a caching plugin.

When someone visits your blog, your SQL server dynamically creates the page they have requested, when X amount of Digg visitors suddenly and simultaneously visit your site, your SQL server is likely to have a heart attack. What caching plugins do is create static copies of your articles, so that the pages are be sent without your SQL server having to create them for each individual visitor.

This doesn’t reduce the amount of bandwidth used or data transferred by your host, but it takes the stress off your SQL server reducing the likely hood of a crash.

A caching plug-in also regenerates the pages at regular intervals, so any changes your make or new comments left are updated, this is usually every 10 to 30 minutes depending on your settings.

As for what plugin to use there are a number of choices, two of the most popular are WP-Cache and WP Super Cache. Which one you pick is up to you though, personally I’m using WP Super Cache but that’s not to say WP-Cache isn’t just as good.

If your serious about your blogging and social bookmarking, have a look into these plugins and future proof your site for the day you hopefully hit the front page.

What are your thoughts?

Has your site crashed or survived a Digg front page listing? Can you suggest any better caching plug-ins?