Internet Marketing Toolbox

When you publish on the ‘net, there’s always that knocks the wind out of your sails and sets you back. If it isn’t a change at Google, it’s something else.

The latest and most ridiculous thing of all time to happen to me was to do with my web hosting providers suspending my “busy” sites because they “consumed too many resources” on their shared servers.

What was ridiculous was their definition of “busy”.

Basically if you have more than a couple of people visiting your useful, interactive site at any one time, they’ll flick the switch – often without telling you!

If your site is small, with mostly STATIC html pages, not serving any large files, and not too busy (say under 10,000 visits a month) shared servers are probably OK.

Forget claims about giving you multiple gigabytes of bandwidth!

If your server gets too busy, they will kill it without hesitation.

And if it has scripts that interrogate back-end data, and you get some half decent traffic, you better check your sites several times a day to make sure they are still up!

Chances are you WILL need to take your hosting to the Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated server level, sooner rather than later!

I recently moved THREE of my busiest sites to a VPS because of this problem.

Unfortunately, the downtime coincided (I think) with Googlebot visiting, finding nothing, and deciding to (again) delete LOTS of pages from Google’s index, resulting in yet another HUGE drop in my organic inbound traffic… and income!

And now, it will take several months before those missing pages get reindexed!

It’s a constant struggle to stay on top of your traffic!

Coincidentally, just as I write this post, I’ve finished chatting to the support desk about one of my servers being down… an issue that I brought to their attention…and one which has now continued on and off for the best part of the last 12 hours! Oh well, I had planned on moving those sites to my VPS soon anyways… Looks like it will be real soon!

You really need to monitor ALL of your sites/servers for downtime SEVERAL times a day - and KNOW how to get onto your support desk quickly (24/7 support is essential).

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