Comment made by Marc noticed me I forgot to describe how I managed to survive traffic driven by Digg, you know I cannot miss another opportunity to shill my favorite hosting company 
Let’s get started from this quote:
The way this system is made possible is by keeping track of each customer’s individual usage using a system we created, called GPU (which stands for Grid Performance Unit). Each (gs) Grid-Service hosting plan includes a large number of GPUs which have been carefully calculated to provide 99.7% of all customers with enough resources to never exceed the GPU allocation. For those clients operating large scale web sites experiencing daily or infrequent traffic surges, GPUs allow you to host your websites without worrying about reaching an arbitrary limit before getting shut down.
Yes, 130,000 of pageviews generated by Diggers gobbled something about 20% of my monthly limit of server usage. This is nice, especially if I still haven’t set any caching
August 23rd, 2007 #
Now that is a seriously good host. Why don’t all other hosting companies employ this technique? It’s really ridiculous to see that purple ‘bandwidth exceeded, contact billing department’ screen when the site runs out.
And perhaps you should have used the wp-cache plugin to save bandwidth. Perhaps next time, eh?
August 23rd, 2007 #
How many gigs is your 20%?
August 23rd, 2007 #
Good question!
August 23rd, 2007 #
Marc: Just because technology used by Media Temple is unique
Other hosting companies do entice people with big amounts of bandwidth in their offers BUT their shared servers are not able to survive the system usage generated by services like Digg, Slashdot, Reddit or whatever. So when one’s website becomes popular and number of pageviews is increased dramatically in a short period of time, they simply turn that site off…
Mutiny Design: Good question indeed - it’s about 3 GB. The reason why I haven’t even checked is the fact that Grid bandwidth is limited to 1 TB monthly. You see I don’t host there any warez downloads so I take care only on the system usage
August 24th, 2007 #
Well since I share a master reseller account with a paid host I have enough bandwidth available to me. Right now the limit is set at 5 GB but I can increase it to even 60 or 80 GB to survive Digg.
August 24th, 2007 #
Marc: System usage and bandwidth are to dramatically different factors. So if one pageview generates 35 queries, just guess how many queries will be generated by 30k pageviews in 10 minutes without any caching and which shared hosting can manage it.
But I do think you don’t have to care about with the reseller account, of course it might be good to check your statics of system usage and compute the numbers anyway