The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

Hi Folks,

As many of you noticed early this morning our site went down. With the amount of emails I received I’d say that a lot of you noticed. Now here’s where I make the ultimate business sin and admit something went wrong.

Our site has benefited from exploded growth since we moved to an all Pro ‘paid‘ membership site. Everything was going great. Membership levels were up, abuse was down and that’s with almost no promotion. The thirty day free trial and those of you taking advantage of our referral program really got things moving fast.

Growth is great but it comes with a price. We now average well over forty thousand hits a day and we even dropped to sixty two thousand on our Alexa rank, even though it’s up slightly from that right now.

The problem came when the hosting company we recently changed to shut down 4U2BN.com, our tracking script, due to the strain it was putting on the server. Even though we were well below the bandwidth we had purchased, we were using over twenty five percent of the server. We had hoped that by purchasing a reseller’s package the shared server would be enough to run our sites.

When there are three hundred sites on a server and one of them takes up one fourth of the resources you have a problem. HostGator did exactly what we would do and took the site down. The problem I had with HostGator was that their 24/7 phone support, the biggest reason we picked them, amounted to a big joke. Sure, I was able to get someone on the phone in minutes but that’s just to hear them tell me to complete a support ticket and wait for a response. And wait I did. I waited almost four hours just to get an excerpt of their terms. Four hours and still no help and I was getting bombarded with emails and even cancellations. After another two hours I was finally granted limited access to get the most recent backup. I took that backup and quickly moved the site back to Kiosk. Luckily I maintained an account with Kiosk hoping their recent improvements would result in 24/7 phone support rather than their conference room support. I travel all the time and I need phone support. In fact, as a side note, I just spent seven days in the mountains at a Big Bear Lake resort in California and internet access was very difficult. I was lucky to get online half an hour at a time and it moved so slow it took that long to get into my email.

Phone support is important and it looks like we’ve out-grown shared servers so now I’m looking into a dedicated server. Server moves are very inconvenient to our members so I want to be sure the next move lasts a very long time. I want to pick the right hosting provider the first time. I’m looking over dozens of companies trying to find that perfect balance between equipment, service, support and expense. So, yes, we will have yet another hiccup in the near future, hopefully only for an hour or two while everything propagates. Until then, our site is running smoothly at Kiosk and with any luck we’ll be ok there for a couple of days.

So there you have it, our admission and planned solution. A friend of mine, a very popular marketer that most of you have heard of, recommended I keep quiet and let this morning’s problem die down. I value his advice but I started this site for myself and it’s members. I believe the more interactive the site the better off we will all be. Feel free to leave your comments. Good or bad, I can take it

Tags: Updates