My experiment to release a series of posts today, every hour for 12 hours, went largely unnoticed by everyone, except the one person who hates my music video posts the most.  Turns out that September 1 is one of the lowest traffic days that this blog has seen in a long time.  Who knew?  I think that I have lost a couple of readers due to “back to work” time, and at least one regular reader has steered clear of WaS recently.  So the numbers are definitely down… but that is ok… gives me something to work toward.

And a special shout out to Amanda for her comment this afternoon!  :-)

The recent blog outages have certainly driven home a couple of lessons.

• Stay on top of the financials.  When you pay for a service on a yearly basis, it’s easy to forget to update your financial records if something changes.  In this case there was a change of credit card information that did not get updated with the service provider.  The wrong card was charged, and it all went downhill from there.
• Verify contact information.  Not only was the wrong credit card on file, but I also noticed that a now-defunct email address was used as the contact information for all my websites.  This wasn’t really an issue this time, because I could quite clearly see that my account was in trouble, but had the service provider attempted to contact me through email, they wouldn’t have been able to.
• Backup regularly and test the backups!  I used to have a plugin set to send me a weekly copy of my WordPress file that could be used to restore my blog to a previous point in the event of a catastrophic failure… like the one that I just had!  For some reason, I stopped using that plugin… probably because I was tired of getting the constant emails.  That was a mistake.  In theory I could have restored the blog, or have re-created it on another server.  PowWeb does have an automatic backup/restore option, but it does not include SQL databases, which makes it kinda useless for my needs.  Trust me, I tried it.  Twice.
• Redundancy.  I mentioned this is in an earlier post, but I’ve heard of online marketers who use two separate webhosting services for their sites.  Only one can actively host a site at a time, but in the event of a failure, you can easily log in and redirect the DNS to point to the backup hosting service.  It’s an insurance policy.  I don’t really see myself requiring this until I start to make some money with this stuff… but it’s definitely worth keeping in mind.  Webhosting runs a little over $100 for the year, which is far less than I would have lost during these outages had this been my primary source of income.
• The message must get through.  This is something that was drilled into my head years ago when I was part of the Communication Reserves.  You do whatever you have to, to make sure the message gets through.  I’m lucky.  In the case of WaS, most loyal readers are friends in real life and I was able to tell them what was going on through txt, email, or voice.  But it really hit home the need for an alternate channel to ensure that readers (and eventually consumers / clients) were informed.  I had been toying with the idea of adding a newsletter subscription service to the growing arsenal of tools.  Now, it’s an absolute high priority.  You can expect to see Aweber newsletter services offered here shortly.

Hopefully these outages are a thing of the past, but all things considered, the lessons learned have been a positive experience.  Better to go through these pains now, when the stakes are much lower.

Right after I wrote that post about my experiences with PowWeb support, I started looking for a new Twitter integration plugin to install… and with one simple click of the button, my website was dead!  My initial instinct was that PowWeb had done something to my account again, but after checking the status of my other blogs, that assumption went out the window.  No, the problem was unique to WaS.

It took 2 days, but I finally received the fix.

After reviewing your site, we found that one of its 59 different plugins is now preventing it from loading as it was intended. As we do not support 3rd party applications such as Word Press beyond their installation via Install Central, we will not be able to correct this for you. We recommend renaming your plugins via the File Manage starting with the latest ones added until you find the one causing this problem and delete it. Alternatively, if you have any backups of this sites database, you can import them using phpMyAdmin. Let us know if you have further questions.

Oh, I knew which plugin it was… Twitter For WordPress… I could see that it was installed at 7:40am on Friday morning.  The exact time that my blog went dead.  I didn’t even bother renaming it.  I just simply deleted it and voila!  Problem solved!  So I wrote them a very nice “thank you”.

Open mouth… insert foot… story of my life.

So the blog was down for nearly 13 hours since last evening, until a few minutes ago…  First, let me say THANK YOU to everyone who sent me a text or tweet to let me know that it was down.  I’d rather get a few messages from people telling me that there was a problem, than to go about my life thinking that everything was ok.  Certainly I would have picked up on it on my own, but that’s not the point.  It’s good to have people who care enough to let me know that something isn’t right with the blog.  So thank you.

Second, I’m extremely disappointed in PowWeb for 2 things:

1. My account was suspended due to a mysterious charge back on my credit card, when in fact no such charge back was ever requested.
2. When I called to have the problem corrected, I encountered incompetence at its finest.  I don’t know if the guy hung up on me or what, but I called back and got someone else who was at least a little better.  But even HE told me that it would be a couple of hours before they could unsuspend my account!  I was sitting in front of a screen showing my online credit card activity, and it clearly showed how I had paid for my yearly subscription… yet it would still take a couple of hours.  When I woke up this morning, it was STILL suspended!  I was just about to call again and suddenly everything came back to life.

I don’t believe that it takes that long to have something like that corrected.  I should know.  I had the same thing corrected earlier in the week!  Over the phone!  That time there HAD been a charge back.  It was unexpected, but it wasn’t PowWeb’s fault.  When I called them and provided them with more details, they were able to unsuspend the account within 15 mins.  So I know damn well that it IS possible, if you get the right person.  Obviously, in this latest instance, I did not.

I’ve heard of some online marketers paying for 2 separate hosting services.  In the event of a problem, they can switch the DNS to point to their backup.  If I get serious about this, it might just be something to look into.  Get all my eggs out of the same basket, so to speak.

Not happy PowWeb… not happy at all…

Some of you may have noticed a little snafu with the blog today. Just a minor problem with the billing records. Nothing to worry about! Everything has been updated, and should be good to go.

Thanks for your patience.

Stephen

You may have noticed the sudden inclusion of advertising again on the blog.  I’m still not convinced that it’s the way to go, but I’m playing around with it, trying out different things.  Placement is key.  By default I had it running down the bottom right, but I don’t think that anyone even scrolls down that far, and I didn’t want to have it at the top.  I’m not a big fan of banners and in your face stuff like that.  Maybe that’s the kind of advertising that is good for bloggers, I don’t know.  But I was looking for something a little more subtler.  And yes, I realize that I’m not going to be able to quit my day job based on a few clicks, but it’s a start.  I wanted to try a few things here before I migrated them elsewhere.

Hopefully people don’t find them too annoying.  As always, feedback is appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

I don’t know what the difference was yesterday.  Yes, I posted a few more times than I normally do. Yes, I’m the top search term result in Google for “2520 calorie hamburger”. Yes, I’ve managed to cultivate a few more loyal readers very recently, for which I am extremely grateful.  But I’m not sure that any of that explains the massive spike in blog hits yesterday… 188!  That’s exactly twice as many as the previous all-time high from back a couple of months ago! Needless to say… thank you!

That really made my day!

Back in June, I mentioned that the blog broke the old record for hits in a single day… 79.  I attributed it to a little post I did about a certain t-shirt, and a girl who took notice.  Amongst other things…  well yesterday smashed through that ceiling, coming in at 94 hits!  It appears that people may have been interested in reading about my trip to Cape Breton, after all.  Or maybe they were simply looking for more pictures of my handsome mug drooling on my Tweety bird pillow as I slept… Whatever the reason, I am happy to see the spike.  I recently read a term called vanity metrics, meaning things like blog hits, and how they were nearly useless in terms of tracking real value, and more for inflating a blogger’s ego.  And I agree!  But without a measurement of reader traffic, there’s really no point in measuring anything else.  No matter how valuable your message is, if no one is receiving it, it doesn’t really matter does it?

Thanks for reading!