Digital Wanderer

However, the funniest thing happened to me in the virtual world. It is, of course, of a slightly tech-related nature, but it sure sparked a storm of emotions in me.

Here is the backstory. A month ago, they wrote about my site Radioarchive on the well-known blog dirty.ru. Registration there is by invitation only, but they easily give them to those whose sites were linked. As a result, I started periodically dropping by dirty, and commenting. (By the way, if anyone needs an invite, I can send one).

And the story itself began yesterday. I should mention that the show "FM Dostoevsky" is recorded for me by a robot, that is, a program located in the same place as the "Radioarchive" site itself, meaning on an American hosting server*. And so yesterday the program couldn't record FMD, because it was viciously killed. (That is, turned off by someone or something). When I logged in to see what was the matter, it turned out that all the programs I launched were being destroyed after 2-3 minutes, or even earlier. I was already about to write angry letters to customer support, but decided to use my head first, which is always useful. I looked at the CPU load: "Mother of God"! Most of the processor is being devoured by my site. And this is despite the fact that a super-powerful server is standing there, and before that my site was less than a mosquito bite to it. So I got the idea to check the site's traffic stats.
And I experienced A GENUINE SHOCK.
Over the previous 2 days, the site was visited 120 thousand times, and the number of unique visitors was around 40 thousand.
Thus, I surpassed the traffic of not only  Zvuki.Ru phoneme, but even Goblin's Tupichok.  And if I had been registered in the  Rambler top-100, the first place would have been mine. And if by this point you haven't had any questions or suspicions about my sanity, then you are either an idiot or a saint. And the question goes like this: "Why on earth did 25 thousand people from all over the world suddenly rush to listen to two Russian radio shows?".
The answer sounds mysterious: "Not of their own free will". But who forced them? And that's an entirely different question, to which a detailed answer will now be given.

The reason for everything is the already mentioned dirty, or rather, its visitor from Estonia. On dirty there is a special section called "Leprosorium", for chats on free topics. It turns out to be way more interesting than a forum: one person writes some nonsense, and a hundred or two comment. And so this visitor told the following: one of the strains** of the Bagle virus has a link to his site. That is, it's a thing everyone knows about, when a virus (or rather, an internet worm) forces the infected comp to visit a certain internet address (usually the address of a porn site). But specifically in this strain, for some reason, there was a link to his site. But the guy didn't really need these thousands of visits, and he decided to share with the people. Doing this is elementary - a redirect to another site is set up, and that's it. And owners of all sorts of tiny sites about critters and other frills started asking him in the comments to do them a favor.
The result is extremely funny - off-the-charts counters and ranking positions, hosting providers flabbergasted by the massive load on tiny amateur sites, crashing servers. Having read the comments, I decided to experience the traffic hurricane personally, but, possessing a certain modicum of reason, asked to turn on the redirect for only 5 hours. However, the barrel organ has been grinding away for three days already, and there's no end in sight! Reminds me of the Russian folk tale about the little pot, and the Greek one - about Croesus.
The result, on the one hand, is interesting, and on the other - sad. It's interesting in that my hosting easily withstands 70,000 visits a day. It's sad in that now all the real statistics are ruined by forced visitors. By the way, there are more French people than anyone else, clearly they are the most careless and have no idea about the existence of antiviruses.
And the worst thing is - I couldn't record the show. It turned out that restrictions on CPU usage came into effect on the server. That's exactly why my programs were dropping like flies. And the hoster had promised that there were no limits on CPU time.
In any case, it turned out to be a highly educational experience, so I am satisfied.

*Hosting - a place where sites are located. Usually it's a server or a system of servers (cluster)
**Strain - a slightly modified version of the same virus