I'm suprised that your shared host provider allow you to host your site when your site has grown to a size of 5-6K uniques. Even with my 5k uniques, my VPS provider suspended my account and asked me to pay for a dedicated. -.-
As a web developer outside of AdSense as well, server load times are a very important factor when attempting to attract more visitors. It is a well known fact that people do not wait for pages to load, as they all know there is countless other sites out there with the information they seek. Whether your site is an informational resource, a product store or anything in between, fast load times increase visits, and visitor retention. People will normally come back to a quick loading site because they found the information they want, and fast. Visitor rentention is just as important, if not more important, than attracting more visitors. Returning visitors look at more pages than new ones do, increasing your chances of them clicking on a relevent ad.
.. 12pm Tuesday, and on-track for another record (or near record) day.. My new host is Surpasshosting.com .. i dont have any affiliate links or anything.. They have been great in helping get setup. Since i know NOTHING about settin up no servers, they did a few of the things i could not figure out - usually within just a few hours.. i'm really happy with their support.. This is what i got: Intel Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz 533Mhz Bus Memory: 1024 MB DDR (1GB) System Memory Storage: Dual 120GB Hard Drive w/Backups Transfer: 1,500 GB per month IP Addresses: 4 :: Private VLAN I guess i could re-sell space on it, but since i'm a n00b i'm not even going to try.. I'll hog all the CPU and bandwidth to myself Ok, i'm off to go watch my Adsense stats !
That is one thing that really gets to me. You do everything to promote your site. You work you butt of trying to get traffic and back links. No matter what you do, you don't get much luck from your marketing approach and then you find out that it was actually because your server was to slow and your visitors were just leaving before the page loads. This happened to me about 2 years ago, before I realised how good dedicated servers were. The thing is, that you realise how long you have been on a shared hosting account and if you had a dedicated server from the begining then you think how much money you have lost over the years since having the shared hosting account. To speed things up even further, you could try putting one site on a few dedicated servers so that the CPU gets shared out amongst your site.
having a slow loading time actually INCREASES your CTR in most circumstances. they're tired of putting up with your site and clicking on the adsense ad is a way out. I've seen it happen tons of times on my sites when something was bogging the server down.
The CTR may increase a little, but I wouldn't think it would. Even if it did increase you are still earning much less as you will get less repeat visitors and also less pageviews per visitor. Overall, a slow site will decrease your overall earnings from any affiliate program.
yeah, I'm not suggesting anyone actually try that strategy out. obviously quick loading pages are best in the long run. but quick, speedy pages generally leads to lower eCPMs (since each visitor visits more pages) and lower CTRs (as a result of that + the fact that you're not frustrating your users). it just goes back to people needing to realize that, at the end of the day, your CTR / eCPM really doesn't matter much; it's your earnings that count.
This is exactly true. i chanced my servers last month and i saw my earnings increase. i suugest all for use fast servers. Regards, Mustafa
Just another update, then i'll shutdup.. Yesterday I missed my all-time earnings record by about $7... and traffic was higher than the previous day.. It looks like today will shatter my previous daily earnings record (a $200 day is not out of the question based on earnings so far this morning.). So in summary, I guess a faster server will allow you to reach your full potential of traffic.. obviously a fast server will not generate traffic, but if you DO get decent traffic already and you have a slow host (mine was real slow during peak times), then you ARE missing traffic... I'm going back to stare at my stats more
Good stuff. I never knew this made so much of a difference. What tool are you using to check load times? I've used a few tools online and every one of them seem to give me a different load time. One says 3.1 seconds, another one says 19.1 seconds.
Security is actually pretty simple. It's not what ports are open, it's what software is running on the open ports. For a basic web-server the only ports that should be open are the ones being handled by Apache. When using a database, don't trust user input. PHP has a single function which will clean any user input so it's database safe. Sites get hacked because of sloppy code. Not because of the server they're running on. Slashdot recently ran an article about a report which stated that most visitors will leave if the site isn't loaded within 4 seconds. The improvements most likely lessen with every second you cut from the load time. At a certain point people just don't notice.
How many users a day are worth moving to dedidcate to ? It's a big expense jump (around 2000 a year) so I guess It's not worthy with less than 10k uniques a day ...
It's worth it when your site covers the expense and the load time is greater than 5 seconds. You could also just look into making your web-site more efficient. Some of my sites were a little slow until I fixed the database. They're humming right along now on a PIII 933Mhz system. The system handles a couple thousand uniques a day.
"TOOL" ? I don't need any tool to see the difference between a 30 second page load and a 1.5 second pageload.. i type in my site, press enter, and start counting.. 1-onethousand, 2-onethousand.. like i posted originally, i was getting about 4-6k uniques per day and earning around $2400-$3000 per month (not all from Adsense)... before making such a big jump in cost, you have to do the math to make sure it makes sense.. it was a risk for me, and i wasn't sure it would pay off.. but so far it has..