Drama here at the mini web empire over the past few days. I was critical of Godaddy for taking down several of my sites after an advertising traffic surge of about 9800 unique visits to the new medical tourism blog MedicalTraveling.net put a strain on the shared server. After the blog post / tweet and intervention by CEO Bob Parsons my issues were very quickly resolved and now I’m on a much better server setup that should be able to better handle the high traffic I expect at that blog.
Still trying to figure out why it took Dr. Bob’s clout to resolve this. The tech folks I talk with at Godaddy are usually very capable and attentive, yet two of them had insisted to me there was no way to expedite things after what they seemed to believe was a “network violation” caused by the traffic surge to the new blog. Uptime was particularly important to me on my new Medical Tourism blog because it’s being reviewed by Thai tourism as my entry in their Medical Tourism blogging contest where finalists will be flown to Thailand for an introduction to the country and to their very advanced medical tourism infrastructure.
So … we’ll see if there is a happy ending to another installment in the great lifetime blogging adventure, and I do want to thank Godaddy for coming through with a fast fix after the initial frustrations of having sites taken down.
Joe Duck 
Hi Joe – Hope all is well. Good seeing your comments. If you can help with marketing the Klamath Basin Birding Trail and our new booklet, that would sure help me out. We have video on the website of the Klamath Basin Refuges, and the new 72 page booklet is surperb. People just don’t know we have it. Jerry is doing the website – any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and Happy November! Cindy
Hi Cindy, nice to hear from you and say hi to Jerry for me! IMO the best things to do now to spread the word about sites are to maintain an active blog on the topic, participate at Twitter often and helpfully, and cross link a lot with related resources and local travel related projects. Here in Southern Oregon there’s always lot of territorial tourism. I don’t often see websites cross linking in ways that would help everybody. For example Ashland’s key travel sites should be linking to Klamath Falls key travel sites for the term “Klamath Falls” “Klamath Falls Travel”, “Oregon Birding” etc. and vica versa. Then, all the ships rise for the queries that matter most to them. Google likes to see this as long as the sites really reflect great content for those terms.
This is one of the reasons I got out of local tourism – it was often hard to get everybody thinking outside of the box to do mostly online regional cooperation rather than competition. There’s room for both of course..
Good afternoon Joe,
My name is Cedar Coleman and I’m the Senior Director of Product Operations at Go Daddy. I sincerely apologize for your sites having been down and I understand your frustration. Please know my team worked diligently to restore your sites to working order and to move you to our newest grid hosting so that your site is being served by the most powerful and scalable shared hosting product we offer.
We certainly do not want to penalize you for the success your site has had, we want your site to grow and receive positive traffic. In a shared hosting environment, resources are fixed amongst customers and at times we have to take actions to maintain the integrity of the other customers on a web server. This simply involves moving the site that is using more resources to a different server that has available resources. Unfortunately in your case this normally seamless migration was anything but, and your sites did in fact go down.
Please accept my apologies and know that we take your situation, and all other customer issues, extremely seriously. I will be reviewing internally why your situation needed to be escalated to this level to be resolved, and I appreciate you letting us know about your experience. Thank you, and best of luck with your contest entry!
Thanks Cedar – I appreciated your excellent help getting the sites back online!
Load balancing, cloud computer, resources on demand … all these slogans about high performance ultra-reliable computing.
So what could have been anticipated? If you thought there would be a spike in demand can an arbitrary spike kick up the available resources just prior to your actual need? Should new url namespaces be propagated in a different fashion?
Is co-hosting an expensive “saving” when reliability is truly needed? Or is it similar to aviation: the ticket prices are so low that those bargain prices are clearly below the amount at which safe and reliable flights can be provided. Just as the passengers of some bargain airlines are playing roulette perhaps so are web sites playing roulette because they seek “bargain fares”?
Great questions FoolsGold. Normally when you move sites you keep info at both servers until the DNS info(domain name system – where an IP address number is translated to a domain name)propagates to the rest of the internet. Basically keeping things at two locations until only one is needed. In this case my extra traffic was putting too much strain on the server so it was slowing down other sites, so keeping me up was not an option for them on what I know understand was an older, single machine hosting several sites. Solution there in my view is to either scrap that single machine shared hosting in favor of a grid OR to forward to a single page that can be configured to say something so users would not be confused by the “access forbidden” messages they got in this case.
The benefits / pitfalls of dedicated vs virtual dedicated vs shared hosting still challenge me even though I have had all these options at various times, and continue to prefer shared hosting because of the huge cost savings and expert assistance 24/7. Dedicated servers that our own guy manages – such as the one we have to host Online Highways and U-S-History.com – require relatively expensive management and still can go down.
I think grid style hosting – where large numbers of machines can balance out resources – is probably the right answer for the overwhelming majority of websites, but there are issues like security and scalability that are well beyond the scope of what I know about.
I’ve heard bad reviews regarding godaddy and hearing your experience with them made me think, ooppps, here goes godaddy again. But, at least your issues have been resolved, I just hope godaddy is like this to everyone they’re serving. Be consistent in providing satisfactory customer service and technical support.
very nice article, keep it moving
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