It all began as a rather normal day over at PinkNews, the website I founded and edit. We were working our way through our normal daily diet of gay rights, trials, politics and entertainment stories, when a news story relating to Hillary Clinton popped into my colleague Marc's inbox.

The story, written by our affiliates in the United States, needed a little bit of anglecising, but we were happy to run it. The copy was hardly sparkling and the story, while vaguely interesting - "gay rights groups criticise Senator on gay marriage issue" - it was hardly the scoop of the century.

The story duly got uploaded via our rather primative content management system (CMS) and found its way on to our RSS feeds. As you no doubt know, the RSS feeds alert our users to a new story and prompt them to visit the website or send the story to a friend who they think might be interested.

A few hours later, our computer systems seemed to slow down. "Is there something wrong with the internet?" I asked.

"No," was the simple reply, and it dawned on me that there might be a problem with our web server.

The site was still visible, but it was slowly dying. The first thing to go was the "sponsored links" section of every page, the area where we display paid links relating to the subject of a particular story. For example, the Hillary Clinton story, being concerned with marriage, would display advertising links relating to "gay marriage".

Next, images stooped being shown on the site, then the headlines disappeared, and it wasn't long before an error message informing visitors that "this website is unreachable" was being shown to all and sundry.

Then my mobile telephone rang.

"You've been Drudged!" said the northern voice on the other end of the line. It was Antony Johnson, of the entertainment website ContactMusic.com . He explained that Drudgereport.com, the American news website, was linking to our Clinton story. A quick (or, in this case, slow) view of the server's log files indeed showed an enormous level of traffic coming from the Drudge website. In the space of an hour, we had received more visitors than we usually receive in a week.

The DrudgeReport first received international attention when it broke the news that Newsweek magazine had information on an inappropriate relationship between "a White House intern" (whom we later learned was called Monica Lewinsky) and President Bill Clinton, but that the magazine was withholding publication. After the news broke on the website, Newsweek published the story.

Essentially, the site is a collection of links in the form of a very early stage web log. The site's owner, Matt Drudge, trawls the internet looking for news stories that catch his eye and then links to them. The stories range from mainstream news to stories that wouldn't be out of place as the "cuddly item" at the end of a television news bulletin.

Mr Drudge appears to have a bit of an obsession with the Clintons. His website tends to be littered with links to stories concerning either Bill or Hillary. The website claims to receive around 9 million unique visitors per day, while tens of thousands of readers subscribe to an RSS feed to receive instant notification of breaking news that Drudge considers important or interesting.

The vast majority of websites that the DrudgeReport link to are major news organisations such as the BBC, The New York Times, and Times Online. The effect of a surge of visitors for such websites is a daily routine and something that their web hosting arrangement is geared up for.

However, for much smaller sites, such as mine, it is something that we are not used to dealing with. On average, we serve information to between 10 and 25 users at any one time. On this occasion, we were maintaining connections to hundreds of users per second.

A number of irate calls to the hosting company managing the PinkNews website found that the level of traffic had caused the computer hosting the website to crash and that it was refusing to come back online. Their only suggestion (in broken English, despite being based in Slough) was to wait a couple of days for them to order some new hardware. We had to deal with the fact that our website - which is our business, rather than a tool to assist it - would have to be offline for sometime.

Then to the rescue came Serverstream, a London-based hosting company. I had used them for projects I'd worked on in the past and I still had the phone number for Jonathan Obadia, the managing director, on my mobile phone. He reassured me that they would be able to get a new machine ready for us to use before midnight.

It was actually remarkably simple to make the move. Thankfully, during the few minutes between the site slowing down and going offline, I'd downloaded a backup to my laptop. Theoretically, all I'd need to do would be to upload it on to a new server and then make changes to the name server records.

Essentially, the name server is a computer that translates requests for a website name to an ip address, essentially it tells the user's computer where to look for a website.

Sure enough, at 10 o'clock, our site began to go back online. Slowly but surely, I transferred all the files to the new machine from a backup. By 4am, the site was working smoothly again, but now ready to receive anything that the DrudgeReport throws at us.

All in all it was a little lesson in the price of success and a stark reminder our website is no longer a hobby, it's a real business with employees, offices and shareholders.

Benjamin Cohen made his first million as an internet entrepreneur by the age of 17. Now he is embarking on a new venture, PinkNews.co.uk, as well as writing occasional columns for Times Online

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