After sending a brief note to Bloghosts - our pal Jace to be specific - Sunday night to please keep an eye on things as the traffic was deluging, nothing whatsoever happened to make me think about our hosting company again throughout Monday's insanity, Tuesday's 100,000 visitors, or Wednesday's 90,000: no collapses, no glitches, no slowdowns, nothing but smooth sailing and a shitload of traffic breezing through.
For all I know, Jace had a team of bare-chested, perspiring engineers hosing down the server so it wouldn't melt, or he had it packed in dry ice, or a host of sheperds watching over it by night - I don't know - but I do know he did whatever he had to do to keep us up and running and that it was only after the fact that he mentioned that we had used more bandwidth in ONE DAY Monday than we had used in the previous month.
Now THAT is a hosting company - consider this the highest possible recommendation.
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Article comments
1 - Craig Lyndall
I am happy your host was dealing. My host was certainly not challenged quite like yours, but for the last four days my traffic has been the following.
Sunday - 24,311
Monday - 72,613
Tuesday - 22,403
Wednesday - 3404
Anyway, it was fun while it lasted. I wonder if a little guy like me has any retention from such an event. I think most people clicked in, saw that there were no pictures and left as quick as they showed up.
It made for a few exciting days.
2 - TDavid
Since I already congratulated on the traffic increase in another thread then let me address the other, business angle to this.
The bottom line is did the increase traffic equal more $$ dollars $$? If it was a bunch of traffic that didn't increase revenue accordingly then at the end of the day it was just an expensive traffic surge :( I hope that it increased Amazon revenue and/or attracted new sponsors.
If memory serves, blogcritics hasn't been using bloghosts very long which makes the circumstance more impressive, IMO.
The hosting game changes and I learned years ago that once you find a good, reliable host that charges fairly, it's well worth staying with them. Some people change hosts like they do underwear foolishly in search of the ultimate cheapest deal. It's glad to know that the blogcritics host change didn't result in inferior connectivity when it mattered most.
Chasing price is very dangerous when it comes to hosting.
But, back to the bottom line, hopefully it generates increased business for all involved.
BTW, I am not expecting an answer to this because it is none of my business, but I'm throwing this out for those who think that traffic is the only thing that matters on the web. No, actually, it's traffic that rings the cash register that matters most. Otherwise, well, wait until the bandwith bill comes a'knockin.
I hope Sunday/Monday was a profitable day for all involved :)
3 - Craig Lyndall
Seeing as I have not a single revenue generating item on my site, I have a 0 net gain. Maybe I should sell t-shirts?
Oh yeah.
Nobody would want one. :-)
4 - Eric Olsen
I would, Craig. I wear my "Cornfield Commentary" shirt that David Hogberg gave me all the time.
5 - Eric Olsen
TD, excellent points all. The most important figure will be where we are a week from now - I am certain this will be a net gain for us regarding advertising, but if we are still well above where we were before the flood by a week from now, then it was a BIG gain. We will see how many of the visitors "stick."
I am very encouraged so far: the Google traffic is way down today - people are wearying of Janet - yet we will still come in somewhere between 25-30K uniques today.
6 - Mac Diva
Craig, you can get an overview of visitation times from Site Meter. It also has averages and origination data. Even what ISP and what kind of computer, if you want that.
I've not sold anything on my blogs, despite offers, either. If I go into a second year with them, I may reconsider. A little income, beyond PayPal and gifts, could offset the time and energy I put into them.
7 - Green Boy
Hmm, I don't know how you got such great support out of Jace. Our site suddenly spiked to 4,000 hits in one hour, and Jace pulled the plug on us. I only became aware of the fact that we were down when I brought up the site and found an error message that said 'contact billing.'
According to bloghosts, our site (based on pMachine) starting hogging the CPU and MySQL server and he was forced to shut us down. Being shut-out of the site, however, I was unable to determine what exactly was causing the problem, and was unable to remedy the situation.
It took 48 hours for bloghosts to finally agree to put us back up, on a different server, so that we could look into the problem. Disgusted, I switched the DNS entry back to my former hosting service (which ran our site for more than a year, through numerous visit spikes) and am trying to figure out what to do next.
8 - Eric Olsen
Green Boy, have forwarded your comment to Jace.