This is one of the strangest things that has happend to me as a webmaster. I was hosting my site on a VPS. Was there for lets say 4 months, traffic was very stable, and so were my pageviews. I was getting an average of 40,000 pageviews per day. I then move my site to a dedicated server. THe site looks fine, I browse around and it seems just as always. However, first day my pageviews drop to 19k. Ok, domain propagation I think ,lets give it another day. Pageviews are at 20k Next day page views are also in the 20k mark. WTF? I just have no idea at all of what could be happening, I can see my site without problems, I ran a link checker to see if any links were broken and no, everything is fine. I'm going crazy trying to figure out what did my pageviews drop 50% the exact day I moved over to a dedicated server and have stayed like that ever since. Does anyone have any ideas? My traffic is just like always, no movement there, it is just the pageview count that dropped.
Don't think so, the reason I moved from a VPS was because it sometimes had a hard time with my site so now on the dedicated one it is much faster. Is there some kind of script or site where you can test your loading time?
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm here's a couple.
I want to share the same kind of story This might help you get the answer. I started a Pakistani Music site way back 18 months the site recevices alot of traffic but the traffic is not increasing, i did research ask people than i came to know that the server where site is hosting didnt allow many visitors to download the full song their session drop ... I know this is not the problem with your site ... i am comming to that point aswell ... even i myself able to download the full song but my friends didnt able to download it completely session drop after 500kb - 900kbs. For this i tried different ISP to check, Contact my server admin in Uk he say they are able to download the songs completly .. Few Contacts at USA also able to download it . By switching ISP i came that the problem is with the datacenter where the sever is located they block certain IPs dont know exactly why they are doing this but they are doing it Geographically that people of certain area wont able to download it, alks are going on with server admin with users with my persoanl friends and i experimentent alot, after all that came to know that it was Geograhpical Problem i wasted so much traffic and time and decided to switch host. After that my traffic is doubled in 4 months and triple for the last 20 days. So you might have the same problem i experienced in the past. Switching site takes alot of time specially for some one me who have 64kpbs line and have to move 4 GB of data (no shell access to server to server transfer). Hope this will help out. My English is not so good if some one didnt understand what i am trying to explain can ask again. Regards.
I believe Linda has similar problems, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=32708.. Maby because you moved it to a different server, located at different ip c-block. I have some .com websites hosted outside the US and some .com hosted in the US, the websites hosted in the US rank better than the ones hosted outside the US.
WhatIFind may be on to something...could it be possible that people are not able to view your site based on the Ip address???
I have no idea, but I was loosing 50% of my income thanks to this problem, so I am now back to my old VPS server. $250 for the dedicated one are now down the drain since they don't give refunds, but I was loosing more than that by this weird issue.
A couple of things strike me as a possibility: 1) Quality of network - just because you are on a dedicated line doesn't mean that the network doesn't get congested. You may have moved to a lower quality network. 2) Loss of SERPs - MSN took two weeks during my server move to update to the new server - I left the old one up just in case, and I still see activity over at my old server, although now it's dropped to a trickle. Could be if you took one server down an SE or two may have thought you had downtime and downplayed your serps. 3) Problems on your server - maybe things slowed down on the new server. Maybe you had traffic spikes that it did not handle well. 4) DNS propogation - just because you can see the dns records at major points, does not mean it transferred completely. Remember ISPs cache data too. 5) Network wierdness - could be that the network guys just disabled traffic from certain countries as spam traffic or something. Not likely, but it can happen. 6) Configuration - www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com may point to two different servers. Could be a dns change, an apache configuration problem or something else somehow involved. Anyhow, with that significant of a traffic loss, it's a smart move to head back to where things worked.