Sunday, September 25, 2011

Traffic from Halloween Past

My page Salt Lake Sites- Halloween used to have the top listing in Google and Yahoo. Multiple weeks of downtime at my web host pretty much wiped me out of the search engines.

This top spot gives insight into seasonal web traffic flows.

I admit, the data is disappointing. The top position on Google and Yahoo only delivered 1800 hits in October. I got just under 70 hits per day in the week before Halloween.

There is nothing really that compelling about my list of Halloween attractions (other than it's more complete than competitors). I thought the position in Google would have delivered more traffic. Let's see, I usually get a $1.50 in ad revenue for every thousand hits. The keyword position itself is only worth about two dollars. I just liked that I was getting a predictable spike.

I do have a costume affiliate -- Costume Craze. My affiliate stats says I've sent them 1266 hits since 2006. I've sold 11 costumes and made $50.33. Targetted local traffic is slightly more lucrative than random traffic.

In conclusion. Local web sites do not pay off, but data is fun regardless, and, yes, this post was just a pathetic attempt to recapture a decent spot on Google for 2011 so that I will have another Halloween Spike in my chart.

Friday, September 16, 2011

DNS Problems Resolved

The Community Color sites suffered some DNS problems this last week. I apologize if this change caused any inconvenience.

I had my account moved to a new server last month. Apparently, the old server felt lonely. Two days ago, the old server started sending DNS update requests.

So, I had several days where the account was pointing to different accounts at different times.

For the last several days, I suffered the problme that any new information added to the account was going into the wrong database.

So, if you registered in the last two days, added events or made other changes, you information would have gone into the wrong database.

I apologize for this inconvenience.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Sites Are Coming Back Online

The Community Color web sites are slowly coming back on line.

I had moved to cloud server hoping that cloud technology would be more robust.

Instead, I experienced a cloud burst.

The cloud server had problems that would cause the site go into read only mode and not deliver any of the PHP content. Instead it sent people to an error page.

The host moved the site to a new server. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

I had 80 hours of down time during this fiasco. I apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused.

Sincerely,

The Management