So I’ve been having tons of hosting issues lately. Put simply: Dreamhost and Simple Helix have failed at hosting so far this year. This blog and another 30+ sites I own are hosted at Dreamhost and the last few weeks, months the sites have been terribly slow and the downtime has made me ill. Besides just pissing me off, the downtime has lost me tons of money on my multiple affiliate sites. This blog has been down for the last 4 days and it has affected my affiliate sites in a very negative way.
I never realized how quickly Google updated it’s search results until I checked my analytics when I got back from my vacation yesterday. This blog purposefully links to my other not-so-important sites so that Google thinks they are important, because apparently Google thinks this blog is important. Anyways, the four days that this site was down, my other sites took a dramatic hit in traffic also, all because the links from this site disappeared and that affected the Google rankings of those other sites dramatically.
EliteEternity site traffic stats since my site went down:
One of my affiliate sites:
Note: This site wasn’t down, but it sure was affected negatively by EliteEternity being down.
So I was hoping to earn some cash from this affiliate site while I was on vacation. But since EliteEternity.Com was down, Google thought EliteEternity dropped the links – thus negatively affecting the rankings and eventually the traffic to my affiliate site.
Moral of the story: It’s obvious, but don’t let your sites stay down for very long. It’s a bad thing. Google will think you’ve jumped ship and your traffic and rankings will all be negatively affected.
So why the hell was EliteEternity.Com down the whole time I was on vacation? I was in the process of moving the site from Dreamhost to MediaTemple the day that I left on vacation and I did everything right except I got the dreaded WordPress white screen of death. I didn’t have time to research or anything before leaving, and guess what? Yep, I didn’t have a computer for the four days that I was on vacation, so I couldn’t do much problem solving on the road.
I got home last night and after some research, I found out that the wordpress cache was what was causing the white screen of death. All I had to do was comment (hash) out some code in the wp-config.php file.
Fix the WordPress White Screen Of Death When Migrating to MediaTemple.
If you get the white screen of death when you move your blog to MediaTemple, or another web host, there is a good chance you’re having the same problem. All you have to do is open the wp-config.php file, find this code:
define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager
then add a # in front of it, so it looks like this:
# define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager
Then save it, upload/overwrite the old one and now your blog will load just fine!
I don’t remember where I found out how to do this, but thanks to whoever blogged about how to do this. If it’s you, just comment and I’ll give you credit in this post.
MediaTemple: I’ve been somewhat impressed with MediaTemple thus far. This blog is now hosted on MediaTemple. It’s still going pretty slow for some reason and I just put in a support request for advice. I’ll do another post on my final conclusions in the future. It’s weird, because I have a Magento site on my new MediaTemple account that is loading very quickly! Weird because I would think WordPress would be much less of a drain on resources than a Magento site. I’ll keep you guys updated.
