My precious graph...ruined

Most days, I'll pop along to StatCounter, and have a look at who's been visiting Tie-Dye Heart, and this blog. Most days, I'll be presented with a lovely graph - like the one below, showing the number of unique visitors, and the number of 'hits' (page views):


_{Tie-Dye Heart - 6th Jan to 19th Jan 2008}

As you can see, we were happily averaging around a hundred people visiting Tie-Dye Heart every day, each of whom viewed about 5 pages each - on average. Then a couple of little websites found some comics they liked, and directed their readers over to the comic. This caused a bit of the blip in the graph, but it was still not too bad to read:


_{Tie-Dye Heart - 7th Jan to 20th Jan 2008}

Then...today. I got a message at about lunchtime from Steve over at ComicCMS asking what the hell was up with my site (I'm helping some of his testing by running some hit counting stuff of his on there, alongside StatCounter). When I logged into StatCounter, I could see his confusion. It seems Tie-Dye Heart became rather popular overnight, especially the Guitar Hero Alpha comic.

Here's the hits graph as of 7pm today. As you can see, it's been completely ruined. I'm very, very unhappy about this:


_{Tie-Dye Heart - 8th Jan to 21st Jan 2008}

Now, let's see how long it takes this level of traffic to die off, and how many of the ten thousand or so visitors (and counting) today will come back regularly for more. I'm also going to have to pay my webhost for more bandwidth I think :(

Update: At the end of the day, we had just upwards of 30,000 hits from 16,291 unique visitors, 68 of whom had been to the site before that day (or rather, had been to the site *and* accepted cookies)