In an earlier post I showed how Digg was good for short term traffic spikes, but StumbleUpon outperformed Digg in terms of retaining and building long term traffic for the average blog owner. One reader emailed and challenged me by saying "...Digg is always the best as you get more traffic... so much traffic that your server will crash..." Again, yes that's true in the SHORT term, but you'll garner much better LONG term growth with social media sites (such as StumbleUpon). Have you ever watched fishermen? It all boils down to the type of net you throw out (I allude to this later). Side note: If your blog is hosted on a shared web server, there is a greater likelihood that your site will fail as the server may not be able to absorb the traffic load from Digg or Slashdot (and your hosting provider might suspend your hosting account). You'll be happier with a dedicated server (as it's more reliable and robust), or at the very least, a VPS should perform better than shared hosting. However, let me illustrate by quickly grabbing 3 months of statistics for a specific post (off my Linux based blog). The image below shows the total ...