Update. (old post). You will find this post much more interesting.
Recipe for cutting your blog’s traffic in half in a week:
Step One: Malware
The first whammy came when our server was hit by some malware and labelled by Google as a “virus” site (despite it being cleaned within hours of the attack). Trust me, you don’t want to get on Google’s bad side. After our massive cleanup effort, we found out that it was not us that was under attack, but our hosting company and, poof, our new cleaned version go attacked again. We then worked literally day and night to get the site up and running again, with three programmers in different time-zones overlapping, working around the clock. We decided to move everything to a new server hosting company and in the process our current server hosting company went cold. Died and we could not transfer our files… Unbelievable!
Step Two: Annoy loyal visitors by taking away their favorite tool – the keywording site. And while we where fighting with our server issues we also had to battle 5-10 pissed off emails per day telling us our keywording site was down – which we knew…
Step Three: Confuse the heck out of people by posting weird things. So after all that craziness, I wasn’t all that surprised when today my new guy decided to misunderstood the “post” and “save” function in wordpress and posted a nonsensical article filled with gibberish and google meta-text. Awesome. Just great. We needed that!
Step Four: Well.. so far I am waiting with baited breath to see what step four will be. So far, within the last hour, nothing has happened. It’s eerily quiet. Maybe the techno(logy) gods are giving me a day off? If so, I expect their efforts to redouble and that tommorrow I’ll wake up to my office burnt down, my staff infected with swine flu, my old and new server companies under terrorist attack, all my images to be loaded onto Flickr as free downloads.. …What else ya got techno gods? What else??
I have learned a lot during the last week. Most notably, how to cut your traffic in half in about a day. If you want the recipe you can re-read the above and execute it as a strict plan.
Please hold on. Please bear with us, because not only are we back on track, but we’re just inches away from launching some seriously cool new features, resources and downloads. Stay tuned. I mean, what else could go wrong? Literally.
Yuri – out – sleeping – with one eye open….hmmm
It is happening also a strange thing on your keywording tool, pictures display wrong thumbnails…!
I haven’t had much trouble with your keywording tool (knocking on wood here) and figured your missing posts would reappear soon enough.
Thanks for working so hard to get everything back on track…
(pssst.. don’t tempt fate…with that last rhetorical question… )
Don’t worry Yuri, I have seen bigger website disasters and seen the website bounce back within a short time frame. Just remember, it’s the content that keeps people coming back, and you guys have the content.
Don’t worry man, it can only get better from here on out. I knew that there was no way that last crazy post (from earlier today) was legitimate. You’re going to need a lot of alcohol after this week is finally over 🙂
I read that post on stock photo and thought “wow, someone’s really trying to hit the keywords” your update explains it 🙂
The French like to say “Apres la pluie, le beau temps”. Good job on working round the clock on the fixes.
haha, yeah I was wondering what was going on yesterday. The blog reader picked up the wacky blog post, I clicked here to read it first hand and it was gone (unsurprisingly).
Glad things are ‘back to normal’ – at least for the time being. 🙂
@Mathew: That’s what I thought too… 😉
Yuri, $*&$# happens 🙂 what I really want to compliment you on is the way you handled the follow up. Well done and good luck with resolving it all soon 🙂
So if “microstock photographers making big bucks” was deleted, should we wait for “microstock photographers getting poor” 😉 greetings!
You are proof that beside great photography skils also have great business and crisis management skils. 😉
LOL…
This could be used as an excellent marketing ploy – I LIKE IT!
Ya got my attention!!!!!
Hold on, Yuri! You are still a great photographer! :))
And I see, your site is working again.
Best wishes!
Thanks guys. There is a followup to this story which is even more unbelievable. Right after we had moved to our new service provider, their system broke down. Can you believe this? I mean. The chance that so many things happen at the same time must be absolutely non-existing. Well not for me…. Hoho. Thanks for the support.
I am working on that on. 🙂 hoho
Yuri- I would highly recommend http://www.rackspace.com for awesome hosting 🙂