I don’t like to talk about Engadget’s traffic, I think it’s kind of gauche. I remember when I first started at Engadget in June of 2004, I worked for free and we were doing thousands of pages a day. And I was absolutely ecstatic with just that. It was the peoples’ blog about tech news — we wrote, and our readers connected via comments, emails, etc. Obviously some things changed; we got a lot bigger in terms of readership, and in turn editorially to keep up with the demand for Engadget content. But Peter and I never wanted it to seem like we we disconnected and got too big for ourselves, or that we weren’t your blog anymore. It’s easy to be intimidated by big numbers like 10 million pages a day, so we don’t talk about traffic, I just don’t allow it.

Business 2.0 published a short piece on Tuesday’s traffic, which led to a Calacanis quote and a Tech Crunch piece and, of course, a digg hit. So I guess now’s a good time to clear up any misconceptions there may be. First: we DID NOT go down — not for 7 seconds, not even for a second. (We sure as hell did go down last time at WWDC, but not this time. More on that in a sec.) Peter’s quote to Business 2.0 was (and I was there), “We didn’t go down, but if we did, it was at worst 99.9% uptime.” So to be clear: I checked again later with our techs, and we didn’t go down at all.

Which brings us to misconception number two: this 10m page number. It’s not 10m pages, it’s actually more than 10m but hey, if we’re going to “be numeric” as Gates says, then let’s. Again, we quoted that traffic was “into 8 figures”. It was pretty well into 8 figures, and counting the rest of the Engadget network (Mobile, HD, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish) and that’s even more still. I’m not going to discuss numbers, but I was very proud of what we accomplished, and I’d have been proud if we only did 10m.

The next misconception: we didn’t have increased uniques, just increased traffic. Not so. Looking at our uniques count, we were between 300-400% that day. Our page view traffic between the hours of 12 – 2PM EST (the hours Jobs was on stage) accounted for roughly only 23% of the day’s traffic. In other words, people sought out the news at Engadget. (On a sub-misconception, almost none of that traffic was because of AOL. That day less than 1% of our traffic was referred to from AOL properties — glean from that what you will.)

And finally, the last misconception: we only stayed up because we are on a huge server farm in AOL-land. Totally untrue. The crew at WIN have built the best and most scalable blog platform I’ve ever seen. That’s not kool-aid I’m sipping — it has to be this way because they designed it to stand up to what happens when Peter and I blog Jobsnotes. Since late 2005, any time Engadget has gone down under load — which has been only a handful of times, one of which being during a Jobsnote — it’s been because of something non-Blogsmith related (i.e. a switch died, someone didn’t prep, etc.). From what I was told, our server farm, which usually operates at under 1% total load during normal traffic, didn’t exceed 20-25% load. Which is why we have stayed live under similar load with half as many servers in the past. Honestly, really, it’s the platform!

So did Gizmodo go out? I honestly have no idea, I was blogging the entire time. But I heard from people that they were inaccessible at times. Not that that really matters because it isn’t a pissing contest. People should realize that a Jobsnote is like the worst DDoS any site could ever imagine. As a former network tech, if Engadget went down on Tuesday I would be upset but I’d certainly understand why. The Gawker people have obviously done a great job on their stuff too, and up or down, they did better at staying alive during than just about anyone — just not us (and, from what I hear, Macrumors).