G.I. Korea Still Alive; Elvis Still Dead.
Those of us who have missed GI Korea’s blog can rest assured that he’s alive and well. Not so his hosting service. He writes in to report that he should be back up and running in a few days:
I would like to thank Joshua for giving me the opportunity to let everyone know what is going on with my site the ROK Drop as well as thank everyone for the e-mails you have been sending wondering what has happened to the site. I appreciate how so many people miss the site and can’t wait to see it up and running again.
Anyway here is what happened; as some of you have probably noticed over the past month, my site has crashed a few times. My webhost provider Bluehost informed me each time the site crashed that my site was using up to many resources on their server as my site was going over about 2,000 uniques a day. Each time the site crashed I turned off more and more of the WordPress plugins that make my blog work in order to decrease the strain on the server with the increase in site readership. The final time it crashed Bluehost wanted me to start deleting postings and comments from the site as well as moderating comments to reduce the amount of content their server has to process. I told them I would not delete any content from the site or discourage people from commenting. A lot of work was put into the site and did not want delete any of it. Plus I don’t want to delete or discourage comments from the site. Interaction within the comments I believe is one of the best things about being a blogger especially with the number of knowlegable commenters that frequent the ROK Drop. When I told Bluehost that I would not delete content or discourage commenting that is when they told me I would have to find a new webhost provider.
So I began searching the net for a new webhost provider. As of yesterday I have now found a new webhost provider who is in the process of moving my site over to their servers, which is no easy task considering I have nearly five years worth of material to move over. Once the site’s content is moved over to their servers, then the domain name www.rokdrop.com has to be migrated over to their servers as well which takes a few days. Since I am moving the site over to a new server I decided to take this time to do some site redesign as well. So once the site is up and running again it should be a new and improved ROK Drop that hopefully will be worth the wait to put it all together.
So I would just like to thank everyone again for sending me their e-mails along with thanking everyone in general for their support of the ROK Drop. Hopefully within a week the site will be up and running again after I get all these technical issues worked out and I will begin blogging as usual. Until then I would just like to thank everyone for their patience on this matter.
We’re looking forward to seeing you back.
Thanks for the update.
It is a little odd to me that GI Korea’s would go down so much with 2,000 hits a day.
I use the cheapest domain package at Yahoo!! Small Business to host http://www.usinkorea.org. I get 2,000 or so hits on it, and I’ve got a fair number of video edits up that bring in traffic, and I’ve never had the site crash. In fact, my monthly bandwidth usage is not even close to half of what my package allows. Even during the Virginia Tech shooting period, when the site hits exploded, it didn’t crash…
Maybe there is a difference between blog hosting and full domain hosting???
If that is the case, maybe GI Korea might want to try one of the hosting sites like Yahoo!! – which also offer WordPress and other blogging tools as part of the domain package.
Hits are different from uniques. For example looking at the stats Bluehost provides I had over 93,000 hits on 04JAN. The uniques are how many different IP address are accessing your site a day. One viewer from one IP address could be clicking around your site viewing other content, leaving comments, or checking back later to read other comments on a posting. This drives up both the hits and page numbers but the unique view number would still be worth 1 for the person from that IP address that day. So basically I was getting nearly an average of 2,000 different IP addresses a day visiting the site.
However, I think the best way to judge blog readership is through Feedburner numbers. If someone subscribes to the site on Feedburner that means they are a dedicated reader. The down side with Feedburner is that they do no count as unique views on the site since they reading through an RSS reader. However, that doesn’t matter to me because I think it is more important to have regular readers reading the site then trying to raise site stats. If I wanted to raise site stats I could just post a Korean woman in a bikini every day and the stats would increase but I would not increase RSS subscribers and would probably turn off many of the serious people who read the site.
The difference between blog hosting on a platform such as Blogger is that your site will not crash however you also lose the ability to customize your site because the sites have pre-made templates for people to use. With full domain hosting of a WordPress blog you have the ability to customize the blog anyway you want with the various themes and plugins available. Plus search engines give preference to full domain hosted blogs over Blogger type of sites because the search engines figure that if you take the time to host your own site then your content is probably superior compared to non-domain hosted sites.
I think the biggest issue is that Bluehost’s servers are not equipped to handle lots of comments from a WordPress platform. When transitioned to WordPress I signed up with them because they are cheap. I paid I think it was $320 for a two year hosting where with my new provider I just paid $240 for one year of hosting. My new webhost provider specializes in hosting WordPress blogs so I seriously doubt these same issue will come up once I get the site moved over which will make the extra money spent worth it if it keeps my site from crashing.
The deal I made with my wife is that I would not use our own money to pay for blogging stuff so I use the money from the few Google Ads on my site to pay all these fees with. Anyway hopefully sometime next week I will be up and running again. Thanks again Joshua for posting the update.
2k unique IPs should not crash your site. My guess is that a plug-in may be writing to your MySQL database making it very large, especially type that track traffic. WordPress queries the database for every page load, comment, etc., so the larger the db the larger the processor load. The Korea Liberator had this issue at Lunarpages, but the techs there didn’t tell us and I didn’t know at the time. When it came time to move to Bluehost I noticed this.
GI Korea: I am looking forward to the return of your blog.
I have wanted to contact you directly for some time and personally thank you for your information on South Korea. Your advice to remain alert for motorcycles, motorbikes, etc. on the sidewalks of Seoul has saved me on more than one occasion.
Tukhachevsky, I am happy I could be of assistance and appreciate your patronage on my site. I have some good news for everyone, the ROK Drop is back and operating again. The site migration took some time but I think it will be worth the extra cost and effort to move it in the long run as I should have no more site crashing problems. So I look forward to everyone checking back into the site again.