Adsense and web hosting

Posted by stuart as , , , , ,

Well I’m baaaaack! (Hopefully!)

After a disastrous week with my web host (frickin’ Resellerzoom), who managed to have a server down for for over four days, I started to think a bit about web hosting as it pertains to Adsense.

I have about half a dozen sites of my own (not to mention another half dozen or so sites I host and maintain for paying clients) sitting on a reseller hosting account which were all unavailable for the last four days . About half of these sites are static HTML/PHP pages, and the other half are Dynamic (PHP/MySQL). Just about all my own sites with Adsense on them are static.

This whole debacle has made me think very carefully about getting myself a secondary “backup” hosting account.Watching my adsense earnings plummet over the last few days was heartbreaking, especially as I was just starting to build some decent traffic to them. This was especially troubling in light of the fact that if I’d had a backup hosting account somewhere, I could have quickly created some accounts, uploaded the files, and re-routed the DNS. (Another good lesson here - don’t have your DNS with your hosting company, just in case something goes wrong with the hosting company, you can re-route the DNS to another host).

Backing up and restoring the dynamic sites might have proved a touch more problematic, as I’m a lazy bugger, and am much less likely to have backed up my MySQL databases any time recently. Oh well - as I said, the sites with adsense are generally static, with the only database requirements the pulling of blog feeds from my other sites, but the static sites still function quite well without these feeds.

Another thought that has occurred to me is that if I have another hosting account on a different IP block, I may get some better PR loving from Google if I start throwing links around on similarly themed sites.

If anybody has any suggestions for a reseller account provider (long URL’s with funny looking numbers in them are OK :-)), just drop a comment in here, I’m looking for something with at least a gig of space and 15 gig of transfer a month, with the ability to host around 20 domains.

Cheers