Avoid one-man-ISP shops!
We have had a real estate website for more than 15 years, but it was not until June of this year when we realized how our selection of wrong hosting company was destroying our Real Estate business! Our wrong choice of the hosting company (one-man-ISP in this case) was destroying all of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) we had developed over a long period. Let me explain.
We were smitten by WordPress earlier this year so we started blogging on one of domains which was then hosted by Godaddy! During a WordPress Meetup in San Jose, we met the organizer who claimed he can host our site for about $3 dollars per month! He offered us a special deal for hosting our WordPress site for one year for only $21 dollars and change.
Not knowing what the hell we were doing, we decided to buy his pitch and switch our hosting from GoDaddy to his service! He schedule a call the next day and walked us through the cPanel and the installation of WordPress. Our site was up and running in a few minutes. No harm done and we were happy blogging again.
Not so fast….. here. It’s too early to celebrate yet. The shock came few weeks later when we tried to install WordPress Network also known as Multi Site and we deleted some files on the host side by accident! Then our WordPress site would NOT come up any more!! We started getting 404 errors from the Google Crawler which by that time was visiting our site every hour!
We needed help and needed it urgently. We did NOT know enough about Google Crawler and WordPress to stop it from crawling the site while it was down. The longer our site was down, our ranking was getting impacted negatively! We were losing the precious Google Juice we had worked tirelessly to create created over weeks of blogging. All of our SEO and SEM were going down the drain fast.
It was a Friday and we needed the site fixed ASAP. So I called in a panic to our One-Might-ISP thinking he can just restore our site from back ups within few minutes and we should be fine. He did NOT respond to the phone and it went to voice mail. So, I emailed pleading our case that our Google Ranking is dropping like a hot potato since our site is not responding to the crawl request. He replied that he is BUSY with Dinner and he will get to it tomorrow!! Yes, you read this right ! He added that I should email him the back up files and he will investigate tomorrow (Saturday)!
It was a sleepless night since our marketing campaign and the google juice we had created was being destroyed every hour. The next morning, I was shocked to discover an email from our one-man-ISP
We managed to switch our ISP to another vendor who was able to restore our site with a new installation of WordPress and backup files. We hope we have learned our lesson in choosing the right hosting company because there is too much at stake with SEO and SEM to risk it for cheap hosting.
How happy are you with your WordPress host!? Let us know.
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