One of the biggest dreams that every blogger has, is to create a website or blog that is going to have several thousand hits per hour. Most people that blog eventually reach this limit by providing good quality content or having a bit of luck with a articles that go viral on social media sites. With great power comes great responsibilities… okay maybe is not as great as when spiderman got bitten by the spider, but it’s pretty close.
Usually when a blog grows, they begin to buy more server space, they change some parts of a website, and they also add more functionality. But when a page gets hit by a traffic spike because a popular website linked back to them, your blog or website may not be able to withstand the traffic and could potentially crash. The following list are the top 10 websites that will rape your website if they ever link back to you or if an article ever goes viral on their social pages. The monthly views is only an estimate of how much the sites get per month based on Quantcast.com statistics
#1) Drudge Report – 850 Million Views Per Month
If you’ve never heard of this site, you have no idea what you’re missing out on. The Drudge Report averages about 850 Million hits per month, a single link back from that website will make sure that your site stays down until that link is removed from the DR. You better hope that if they link back to you, you have the right space in your sever to sustain the traffic. They usually only link back to “controversial” news topics or websites that are full of VERY GOOD content.
#2) Reddit – 550 Million Views Per Month
Getting a link on Reddit’s home page is not as destructive as having one on the DR, but it too can crash your site if the content is viral. The large number of people that visit the home page has more than enough weight to bring any website down to a crawl with an influx of visitors. Tek Bull has been hit by Reddit in the past and at the time we were hosted on Blogger (I know right?) we actually got hit with about 10,000 views in less than one hour. Which wasn’t bad, until we realized that the page never even made it into the home page and was only up voted 30 times. There are hundreds of pages on Reddit that get thousands of up votes, if you ever make it to the page, congratulations!
#3) StumbleUpon – 12 Million Views Per Month
StumbleUpon is another giant can bring your site down to a crawl, in our case, it actually took our website down. We had an article about white holes the opposite of black holes and in less than one hour we got so many hits that it brought our website down. Our Hosting provider sent us a warning and they restored out website 20 hours after the spike.
#4) Gizmodo -(and partners) – 20 Million Views Per Month Each
Gizmodo and the Gawker Media group gets thousands of hits per hour, a single entry instantly gets thousands of views from all over the place. A site like Gizmodo can send you thousands of hits per hour. Depending on how popular the article becomes, you may get thousands of hits a day for a long while.
#5) Mashable – 10 Million Views Per Month
The Mashable fan base is amazing, they are very loyal to Mashable, and when mashable decides that they want to link back to a story they found on a small blog, it tends to blow the small website out of the water. Depending on what kind of hosting plan you have, a link back from Mashable will either make you hate or Love their website.
Now of course there are other sites that can really bring your page down to a halt, some are Digg, NY Times, CNN, and other major News channels, Wikipedia, Wiki Answers, just to name a few, but the main ones are the ones that are listed above. The reason being is because they are constantly being updated and constantly get more visitors and users into the page.
