OK, some of you will think I am extremely annoying for complaining about having a high-traffic website. Honestly, I am extremely thankful for having a popular site and love it. Even the problems. But it really is high-stress…

Let me tell you how much work it truly can be when you are managing everything on your own. Today, (Tuesday) the sh*t hit the fan in a bad way. I’ll start with a brief history of my web hosting situations:

When I first started my “popular” website, I was using Hostgator’s Baby hosting plan. Which meant at the time, something along the lines of $9.99 a month and 70GB of bandwidth a month. (I may be off a little with the estimates - it’s been a while. They have since increased their bandwidth in their plans). All was fine until my site started getting a few thousand people a day. I was using quite a bit of bandwidth and needed a new solution.

My next step was a bad one… I had a few different websites, so I decided to get a Site5 account - their deal was something like 5 accounts, 200GB of transfer, for $24.99 a month. After a couple of good months with them, things went downhill quick. My site was down way too often. Site5 ended up being a complete and utter nightmare. My site was down for - on average - a half hour a week. UNACCEPTABLE. I won’t even get into the whole nightmare story behind their hosting my site. (Search the internet - you can find many horror stories about their hosting reputation).

Anyway… I went back to Hostgator - to their Swamp plan, which was 100GB of bandwidth per month. Things were good - I had little to no problems. But then my web traffic increased yet again, and one month, I came up to like 97 GB of bandwidth. It was time to find yet another new solution. So I switched to Hostgator’s semi-dedicated plan at $75 a month.

Read the rest of this entry »