What If? Are You Prepared if Your Blog Suddenly Goes Viral?

Yesterday I checked my stats as I normally do.  One of my blogs showed a lovely spike, not a spectacular one but one certainly large enough to get my attention.  Upon checking further there were a lot of hits coming from CBC, a Canadian television station.  I'm grateful for the extra traffic knowing it too shall pass but the question is always when this type of thing happens, am I'm prepared.  I've heard of blogs going from a couple of hundred of hits a day to thousands just by getting a good Digg.  Logistically this can cause problems. 

One of the biggest problems is image hosting.  If images on your blog are hosted on a blog hosting site like Photobucket, sudden popularity could cause you to exceed your alloted bandwidth meaning all images are replaced by a generic 'upgrade account' image.  However, the image hosting could be minor in comparison to your actual blog host.  A huge spike in traffic has the potential to shut down your blog until the bandwidth resets!  Depending on when this happens your blog could be down for a day or two to a lot longer.  The option is of course to update the amount of bandwidth you can use. 

The problem is you never know if a blog post is going to go viral pushing you over your allotted bandwidth.  Anticipating the event is virtually impossible and paying extra just in case can be costly.  I seriously doubt any of my blog posts will ever go viral.  So I'm not prepared other than to deal with it if a blog post ever does go viral.  I think if one of my posts or even blog went viral the primary concern would be dealing with the heart attack ;)

Garden Gnome
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