Ted's Blog

Because I never was getting much traffic at the iGirder website, I moved my revenue-generating pages back to Speedfactory and, in July renewed the dialup plan for $99 for a year just to take advantage of the free personal website that comes with that. So earlier this month, traffic dropped way, way off and I saw that the Speedfactory server wasn't working. This happens for a day sometimes, so I wasn't that worried, but after a few days I wrote to their tech support people to ask what the deal was. I didn't hear back so I wrote again to a different e-mail address. Still no response. I wrote a third time. Then I called and got to talk to an actual person who said she would have someone call me back. One thing going on is that Speedfactory was bought by Next Phase Wireless a year or so ago. Nobody called me back. At this point it has been a couple of weeks and I am making almost no AdSense revenue and have only 3 orders for the month from Amazon, all during a period when new iPods are being introduced and I could potentially be getting a lot of traffic. Traffic was down from Google was still referring people to the old site until late this week when they must have realized the site was down and started sending people to iGirder, but with my page being way down the first page of results (instead of first; I still have a Page Rank of 3 at iGirder). I called again Thursday. The woman answering the phone asked how long the site had been down. I said a few weeks. She said "And you're just now calling?" I said well, I had sent three e-mails and called once and no one had gotten back to me. She said "Oh boy." I could tell she was really horrified. She said she would make sure people got the message and she would call me back either way to give me the status. She did call back later that day and left a message that it was being looked at. Then yesterday a guy called and asked me some questions. He was handling the site from New Jersey (so I'm thinking the local Speed Team quit or was laid off) and wasn't aware SpeedFactory even offered free webspace but said it might just be a matter of fixing a DNS entry. It still doesn't work, but it does sound like they are working on it.

Here's a graph of traffic which includes both Speedfactory and iGirder traffic. Of course after the dropoff, everything is either iGirder or cached versions from the search engines.