There are a lot of different ways for listeners to get to podcasts. There are a lot of different podcatchers out there, the Zune platform is getting a bit more traction, but iTunes is still the most important distribution vehicle by far. So whenever a show gets featured in one of the more prominent listings on the iTunes store, the producer gets to feel it.

Yesterday I received an automated email from my web hoster, telling me that the traffic for the server that my shows reside on was above the hourly threshold. Nothing to worry about, just slightly over.

An hour later I received another automated mail telling me the same, and this kept going on for the rest of the day.

I know out of experience that there can be many possible reasons for something like that, including the possibility that my server was hacked and used as a relay for vast amounts of spam or as a file server for porn movies.

So I started to go through the log files and reports and tried to find the reason why all of a sudden there was such an interest in my server. But nothing looked totally out of the ordinary, email traffic looked alright, there wasn't an unusual amount of traffic on the two big shows (Tips from the Top Floor and Happy Shooting).

By the end of the day the amount of used bandwidth was about four times as high as it should've been for a regular Tuesday and I went to bed knowing that if things weren't back to normal in the morning I had to spend some time doing some deep digging today.

What I hadn't checked for was one of the more obvious things, and when I opened my email box this morning I found a mail from Jon Miller saying "Did you see that you're being highlighted on the front page of the US iTunes Podcast Directory?"

That's what happens when you produce a small little show (that would be my Daily Photo Tips) that sort of flies under the radar and doesn't get much exposure, just to be discovered by someone at Apple who likes it enough to put it up on their podcast directory home page.

I guess getting traffic warnings from your web hoster isn't always a bad sign...