What a difference a week makes. Last week I was very happy with the performance of my web sites. My martial arts site is doing quite well and my Christmas and Halloween sites are coming along nicely. The recipe article site is now making around $30/month or so ...
Last Saturday I submitted one of the entries from best ever recipes to stumbleupon and a couple of hours later my hostgator hosting account was suspended. I only had 350 hits on the site. Hostgator said I was taking up too many resources on my shared hosting account. I was nowhere near my bandwidth limit and my account should be capable of handling more than 300 hits in a couple of hours.
So, I started looking into dedicated hosting options. Since I already had dealings with hostgator and godaddy I checked theirs first. Godaddy had the cheaper options (more bang for my bucks), so I decided to purchase a "virtual dedicated" server account to test the migration waters before going full dedicated (which is more expensive). My testing was almost complete when UFC 76 hit.
First of all, my MMA site is hosted on godaddy shared hosting. I have had hits of 12000 and 18000 in a day on that account without so much of a word from godaddy, but UFC 76 would be different. At about 8000 hits and on my way to my best day ever they shut me down (same reason as hostgator). So, I found myself without a web site for the biggest two days of my existance. My MMA site does the best during the fights and the day after...thus it's name "UFC Results".
So, I completed my testing and I've ordered a dedicated server from godaddy. My config will cost me about $111/month and includes a p4 3ghz, 2gb of ram and 500G/month transfer. I have the machine all to myself, so no shared hosting woes of them shutting me down for using too many resources. My server should be set up soon and I will start moving my sites over to it.
So, this month could have been a $300 month, but it looks like I'll be closer to $220 or $230...still by far my best month ever. Of course next month a huge amount of my earnings will be tied up in hosting fees, but with the config I ordered this should not be an issue in the future. I may (hopefully) need to bump my bandwidth, but I think my largest month so far is under 10GB bandwidth anyway, so I won't need to worry about that for at least a year.
Note to self: If I do 50x the bandwidth, that's 50x the potential earnings...50x300=$15000/month...it's safe to say if I hit the 500GB / Month then I will not mind adding another $20 to go to 1000GB bandwidth.
Anyway, take care...I've got server migrating to do.
