eMom’s Cup - I Mean Server - Overfloweth
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I’m sorry everyone - I guess when you finally hit your server limits, you REALLY hit your server limits. 
The site will be up and down for the next few days as I move from my hosting company to a dedicated server.
Please bear with me over the next few days with probable service interruptions as the site gets moved.
Apologies for the inconvenience and for the interruption - I really didn’t expect to outgrow my server SO fast and I am frantically researching options to get back to normal uptime ASAP.
Read more about eMoms Behind the Scenes
Sparkplugging Founder Wendy Piersall is dang passionate about helping people start & grow a business while maintaining life balance (somehow). 
Dawud Miracle has one focus: to help you get it. The it? How your website, and blog, can change the way you do business. You can find out more at 
Teresa Morrow manages online book publicity and event promotion for authors, speakers and writers with her company 
Good luck with the move Wendy. It’s great to see how much you’ve grown so fast!
I am interested in what your server limits were and what your new ones are? What kind of Bandwidth numbers are you looking at now??
Best of Luck with the change over….
Good Luck Wendy,
Remember this is good problem to have… too much traffic.
That is a cool luxury problem
Good luck with the move.
Wendy, sorry to hear of the server problems you have been having but it is good to see in the sense that your site is continuing to grow and has reached the point where there was just too much demand for the current configuration.
Wishing you the best in the server transition and don’t hesitate to ask if there is anything we can do to help.
Thanks for the heads up. Now I will know what is going on when I get error messages.
I think I should say congrats!!
I was wondering where you were. Good luck with the move and we are waiting to hear all the details.
Wow, this is a problem that’s good to have! Sure, I know, easy for me to say….:)
Thanks everyone!
I’ve been kind of afraid to comment or post, because every little thing pulls on the database and could bring it down again - I definitely promised a roundup once I’m settled in!
Plus - I can’t wait to test it out with Digg again *evil grin* - Just TRY to bring me down THEN!
I’m curious, who’re you ordering the dedicated server from?
I actually decided to go with a Virtual Private Server (VPS), because it has the ability to scale for huge traffic surges on the fly - and keeps my costs down during ‘normal’ traffic.
So I can call them up on a big traffic day and they can flip a switch to give me more resources within minutes. But I think that won’t happen for a while to be honest - because this site has held up really well under really big traffic surges on just a shared hosting plan in the past.
So based on Dan and Jennifer’s recommendation I went with HostDime.
oh .. I feel your pain .. and hope everything works out for you! I’ve got 2 ISP’s and one of the more than doubled the bandwidth limit in May2007. I decided to also move everything to a VPS (well, not initially but that’s what I’m ending up with). I hope it works out for me to. It’s been 11 days and I’ve been worried about posting anything due to the migration issue and creating extra costs. The finally started this afternoon with the physical transfer. A slow process.
I hope you share your experience with the VPS move! Take care. // HART
Hey Wendy,
Why don’t you let Wordpress host your site? I don’t know how easy it would be to migrate, but they can deal with the bandwidth, processor, and other issues.
I hope you made a decision!
That’s great! Nice problem to have. If you are looking for an outstanding dedicated solution in the future, we just switched to Rackspace (www.rackspace) for similar reasons. Their customer support is amazing! UPtime and reliability and service are very important for us since we run a hosted web application where downtime is unacceptable…baby stuff happens at all hours of the day or night.
dedicated server, talk about upping the budget! $100 a month give or take $20 or so, pretty serious stuff Wendy, that is awesome!
Who hosts your site? I have been looking to change for a while now.
@ Harry:
WordPress.com $600 setup and $300/month
HostDime $0 setup and $60/month
That’s why!
@ Aruni - thanks for that tip - it’s good to have a backup plan, I definitely learned that the hard way!
@ Blain - I’m with BlueHost now and switching to HostDome - although I have to say I’m not entirely impressed with them for the first 24 hours - and they have about 5 more hours of my patience before I yank the account and go with plan B.
@Harry: Have you noticed the lack of general ads or Google’s Adsense links on Wordpress.com blogs? There’s a reason for that. You can’t really run a commercial site on Wordpress.com (technically it’s possible, but they make it difficult), and the TOS allows them considerable control over your blog and the right to delete it any old time they deem it to be a violation of TOS (which can be very subjective at times). I’m not sure if there’s a backup option either to backup the ENTIRE blog (not just the SQL database).
That’s why if your goal is to eventually monetize your blog, it’s best to run Wordpress alone on a hosting provider, which grants you by far the most control over your content.
Wendy, I think that you problem would be a great one to have!!
Congratulations on your outstanding traffic!
So would you still recommend Bluehost for those of us who don’t need a dedicated server? I’ve been very unhappy with Dreamhost and noticed before that you recommended Bluehost…
JoLynn, I do still recommend Blue Host - they always offered excellent support and went above and beyond the call of duty when my site was small enough to fit into their plans.
But once things got bigger, I wasn’t really ecstatic about the site being down so much - but I have to also say that from their point of view, I understand why they did what they had to do. As my site continues to eat up resources, I was bringing others’ sites down.
I really wouldn’t go with any other hosting company for a shared plan other than Blue Host.
So if you do switch to them, please use my sidebar link!
Thanks for being so transparent about your travails. While the traffic overload is a great problem to have - it must have sent you into an absolute panic, especially with technology that you can’t control directly.
How was the migration? Were your providers able to migrate your site build and database for you, or did you have to download and rebuild your site yourself?
Are you back up now on the new server, Wendy?
Yep - still fixing a few tweaks, but we are live!
Hi Wendy,
Thanks for the info on Bluehost. If I switch I will use your link.
Did you ever use Dreamhost before you went w/Bluehost? The past few days it’s been ok but for a couple of months my site was down every day for approx 30-60 minutes. I prepaid for the year though, and I’ve read that they won’t refund your $$ if you cancel after 90 days.
I don’t recommend them to anyone though, not like you recommend Bluehost.
I haven’t used DreamHost - in the past I had heard great things about them. But lately they have had some REALLY unhappy customers hanging around my blog!!!
If you don’t get a good answer from tech support, I would actually call back and try again - sometimes you just get an idiot on the phone and there are much more helpful people on staff.
OK, well, SOMETIMES that’s true!!!
Thanks for your feedback on Dreamhost Wendy….it’s actually worse than that, they don’t even have a phone number to call them, you have to email support….
To anyone who is reading this and is looking for a host, DO NOT GO WITH Dreamhost!!! My site is down at least once a week, sometimes more, and when I emailed them about getting a refund for my unused prepaid year, I got a canned response re: the server downtime that did not even address my issue.
My 2 cents on that…and I’m not a big ranter, but hey, I need my site to be up, ya know?!
Hi Wendy,
I want to follow up on my previous comment re: Dreamhost….shortly after I posted that I had several email conversations with their support dept. and they ended up moving my site to another server. Since then, as far as I know, my site hasn’t been down.
I thought I should put it out there that even though I was extremely unhappy, they actually did make an effort and I’m happy with my service at this time. I’m still keeping Bluehost in the back of my mind, though.