Today was Fluther’s biggest day! It’s always exciting to have a new influx of fresh users — we just didn’t expect you to all come a-knockin’ at once.

Yesterday, Webware wrote a great story which listed Fluther as one of the best designed sites of 2007. It was humbling to be listed next to some of our favorite sites.

Then the traffic came, and our servers were humbled as well. At 7:30am, I learned the giant flood of Digg traffic (to Webware) had slowed Fluther.com to a standstill. Despite our preliminary load-tests and estimates, for the next 5 hours it was a frantic work-a-thon where we struggled to keep our servers alive.

We restarted our servers, upgraded our platform, and attempted other crazy tomfoolery. As of noon, most fires seemed to be out, and the site was working again. Phew. Now, we could breathe.

But there are a lot of lessons we will learn from today. If you have a startup, take heed:

1. Have a solid plan for what to do when the traffic comes, and then test it. Seriously. Don’t run load-tests after you first design your site and then forget about them.
2. Have a worst case scenario ready so if everything goes down you already have a “sorry, we’re flooded page.” Then test that. Make sure your entire team knows what to do.
3. Have some kind of beeper, or some other sure-fire means of communication. When the day of reckoning comes, you don’t want to sleep through it.
4. Make sure to have a staging server–this was invaluable today.
5. Keep your sense of humor. Even when the world is crumbling, you gotta be able to laugh it off.
6. Work with kick-ass people who can solve-problems on the fly. Nothing is more important than the people you work with. Nothing.

While we have a lot to ruminate on, you can imagine that now we’ll get technology in order. We plan to have many bigger days than today. And you can be sure we’ll be ready next time.

To all the new Fluther users: Welcome to the collective! We hope you love our community, and spread it to your friends.