Today, we jumped off our chairs when we realized what had just happened. One of the major platforms that we are developing, Gigasize, was dugg today… and I can assure you it was totally unplanned. We were in alpha phase, testing out functionalities, improving usability, etc., and then BOOM… thousands and thousands of visitors, peaking at around 6-7k / hour at some point. Servers got a very tough ride; we got some downtime, and we got lots of feedback on the comments section of the Digg post. The great thing about this is we got a stress test for free; we were about to do it and then, out of the blue, tons of hits! I think this was a tough first test but a great one, considering it quickly revealed the 3-4 majors points we had to work on to get the site running smoothly.
I got the chance to get an interview with Ammar Khan, director of GigaSize, to have his comments on the events:
“Our goal is to provide the best file sharing platform on the planet! We hope to be the UPS or FedEx for huge files. We didn’t think that people would catch onto GigaSize while we were in Alpha testing and digg us so soon. We were the 2nd most dugg post of the day today (2088 diggs so far)! We thank everyone for their Digg comments (especially the tough ones); we really want to offer users the best file sharing experience. Anyone who wants to contact us can provide us feedback here.”
Well, lessons learned here: sometimes you don’t have to linkbait yourself – it just happens! Stay tuned!
