Kevin Rose Comes to Squarespace

About a month ago now our friend Kevin Rose, host of Diggnation and founder of digg.com, moved his blog to Squarespace. We were of course thrilled, but didn’t think to mention it until we noticed some pretty big stories in Digg linking back to his Squarespace site.

Posts like the one on the left, through the magic of Digg, were the #1 story in the technology section for a few hours, receiving over 3,000 diggs.  That position translates into 100,000 unique visitors to his Squarespace site in about 12 hours, with some hours reaching 10,000 hits alone.  That’s not an estimated number — it actually generates that much traffic.

Kevin’s site is using a package equivalent to the $8/month one we offer, and it stayed up and serving traffic 100% of the time.  That’s something that wouldn’t happen on a shared host running custom software without an immense amount of effort. Why?  Because we’ve already done things like implement load balancing, redundant clustered web servers, server side caching at multiple levels, proper content expiration headers, and more.  If you don’t understand what any of that means, that’s great — because we think you shouldn’t have to.

Comments

[Ian Mikutel]

Great to see Squarespace supporting that much traffic and to see Kevin using the service.

However, I have a few questions...

You say he's using a package equivalent to the $8/mo, however wouldn't 100,000 unique hits in 12 hours go over the 75/gb bandwidth limit? Also I see features such as domain mapping and multiple member features on his site that your pricing page says the $8/mo. doesn't offer.

I'm simply confused as to whether he's actually using a package of higher value than $8, getting special treatment, or the packages page simply needs to be updated with new values.

http://www.squarespace.com/pricing/

Keep up the great work.

[Dane Atkinson]

@Ian, Thanks! We are thrilled to have him as well!

The wording, which may not be super clear, is speaking to his bandwidth being used and the infrastructure. He's using 69,837.2M as of right now after more than 100k hits, which is still under the 75GB offered in the Basic plan. He is using domain mapping too -- so yes, that site is a pro plan with features, but could be served from a Basic if he didn't have the domain.

[A. Casalena]

It's a shame that the entire industry is confused as to how much 75GB really is. I'd be confused too with all of the "100TB FOR $6.99" crap being spewed elsewhere. Squarespace packages are for reliable, real bandwidth. Not bandwidth provided over a shared account that would crash if you actually used it.

I mean, we could technically serve our whole infrastructure off of $20/month in budget hosting accounts, if the offers were actually real or something.

[Rob Steenwyk]

I think you should give it a shot Anthony, I think Dreamhost would fit perfectly as your bandwidth would continue to grow over time so you wouldn't even have to worry about buying a second $20/month shared hosting account!