Ok, readers (the few of you that are left) blogging is sucking really bad right now. For the few of you that read my recent post (written in a crappy ill-mood) about growing pains — Well, forget it. It ain’t growing! That’s right, it’s totally fucking imp. Before anyone’s mind goes wandering off in the gutter let me remind you that I’m still stalking about my blog, not a part of human anatomy. Hmm…? Do they make a viagra for blogs? I’ll have to check on that because my blog has issues right now.
Sooooo, here’s what happened. LikaStarr.com was down for a couple of days, completely down, suspended and disabled by my (now former hosting service) Hostmonster which is a Blue Host company. There, I said it, the name of the company that stabbed my blog in the back. I have unfortunately learned the hard way that letting your site go offline is bad, bad, bad! What happens? You lose search traffic, you lose rank, you lose readers, you lose page views, you lose, you lose and you lose some more. I’ve heard the horror stories from others but it really does amaze me what just a little over one and half days can do. It’s even worse from an emotional standpoint when you personally did nothing wrong and have no control over it – when the hosting company pulls the plug.
Page views, new readers, returning visitors are all down by 39% on average — That just sucks! The pages I had at the top of Google searches, some are buried deep within the results again. The older more popular pages are still there but the newer stuff that had started to rank higher are gone, buried. It’s like throwing the last six months in the trash can, almost. At least I’ve got the experience to bring it back. But the saddest part is that former returning readers think this blog was canned permanently and there’s no way to contact them. People don’t like registering so most don’t. Not being registered means not having their email addresses. That means I can’t contact them to let them know. They are gone forever!
What caused this? It’s the big fat splash page that read: This Domains Has been Suspended which was later changed to This Domain Has Been Disabled. The hosting company said the change in message was the best they could do. What!?!? You see, it was a CPU exceeding error that got it shut down in the first place. Yes it was caused by the blog growing. But it was also caused a by a database problem that caused issues as the site started receiving more traffic. Once they gave me access to the backend I identified the problem but they wouldn’t budge. The told me the only solution was to upgrade to a private server. That’s Bullshit. My blog may have been growing but it wasn’t big enough to warrant it’s own server. They said I was using over 30% of the CPU resources. Funny, now that I’ve corrected the problem and moved to Host Gator, I’m only using 3%. Of course that’s with less traffic for the time being, but the difference wouldn’t effect CPU usage much, if at all. Yet, my previous host wouldn’t even give me to chance to fix the problem.
Right now the only thing that could make me feel better is to take a drive along the countryside and come across a hitchhiker like the one in the photo above. But I’m not worried. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a stumbling block, one that I and this blog will recover from. Now about that ride…
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hey lika, don’t sweat it man! You’ve got a great blog it will bounce back. you’ll see! just please don’t give up.
ps. i think the hitchhiker pic might be the hottest photograph i have ever seen on the internet. if i saw a hitchhiker like that i would hurt someone from crashing my car from trying to stop too fast.
@tony -
Thanks man, means a lot. I agree on the hitchhiker. I thought the same thing. So hot it makes you wanna growl!