Making Money with EPN, Amazon Associates and Google Adsense

Server switch, HostGator screwed me!

October 21, 2010

**** UPDATE *******

As I wrote this post I just checked Twitter and @hostgator…..

We are actively working on affiliate links, unfortunately no ETA. We apologize for any inconvenience. about 4 hours ago via CoTweet

Too bad it’s too many days too late for me. I already made the move. Can’t have this happen again.

******************

This past weekend I went through some major drama. I checked my EPN stats and they were no where near any other day. I noticed that traffic to my sites was down about half on 10-15-10 and it was non-existent on 10-16-10. I started my triage. I went one by one and checked all sites hosted on our HostGator shared account. Everything appeared to be ok except that all EPN queries were taking FOREVER! Immediately I began checking the forums for any notices regarding the API and if eBay was having any issues. I didn’t find anything so I made a quick post to see if anyone was having issues.

After this I began a chat with HostGator techs and told them of my issues. Of course, the only answer they gave was, “it must be a WordPress issue.” WTF! WordPress issue? I told them that WordPress was just fine and they continued to harp on this plugin, and that plugin are causing your slowness. So, one by one I disabled all wordpress plugins and enabled the default theme. Ah ha! Everything came back fine EXCEPT the EPN API queries. Damn was I stumped. I knew on one my homepages I had just a simple query going out to retrieve one result. I attempted to hit the page and NOTHING came back. Luckily for me, I have another reseller account with HostGator and moved the file over to a site I have over there. Hit the page with the query, BAM, instantaneous result, no delay, no hanging, no spinning, nothing. I noted this to the tech and they FINALLY began to investigate on their side. After about a 2.5 hour online chat I was finally given a ticket to up the ticket to Level 3 support.

Once the ticket was logged I immediately gave HostGator a call. Nothing. Waited an hour, nothing. Called again every hour throughout the day and during this time moved my highest earning sites over to my reseller account. Finally, I was able to get a hold of someone that guaranteed a call back within the hour. Finally, that call came at about 7pm EST that night after this debacle started around 8am EST. I spoke with the level 3 tech and he ran a traceroute to the EPN API and it was being “blocked?” Blocked by who I thought. Well, of course the pissing match was about to begin. He stated that EPN has been known to block HostGator at random for no apparent reason. I asked him, if the ip range I was coming form was being blocked then WHY were the queries returning horrendously slow? No answer. Again I asked, why are the queries returning so slow? No answer again. He gave no indication that anything was wrong with the server after my insisting that there had to be a problem.

Summary of the day is HostGator was in no way willing to work with my $9.95 a month account to figure out the true root cause of the issues. The only thing they did mention was that my account violated the total inode count on a shared server. My inode count was near 2.5 million and they stated they begin to look at accounts once the reach 250,000. WTF? Who cares, it’s files dudes. An inode in UNIX is simply a file on the system. I thought I had unlimited space? Apparently not. Moral of the story here is if you, as an online marketer you are taking a HUGE risk with your earnings running through a third party shared server. At anytime they could pull your plug and you’d be screwed! Watch your sites carefully and seriously consider the move I’ve just made. I purchased a month-to-month lease on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) through ServInt. This is the first site to move and all others are on the way. Please do let me know if you decide to move and I’d be glad to assist you through the process.

Good luck, and move to VPS as soon as possible. Take back the control, be your own server admin!