A few months back, my traffic was really booming and I was using hostgator servers and my site was crashing. I contacted Hostgator to see what was going on and if they can help fix this traffic spike. They responded to me within 5 hours, very slow response. They told me it had to do with bots that was slowing me down. So they fixed the problem and when I looked on my site a few of the adsense ads were not showing up, so I emailed them back. It took another couple hours to respond, this time they didn't respond till early morning. So another employee replied and said, you are correct you are missing a code that allows adsense ads to show. So she puts the code back up. The adsense appears, so now my traffic is doing good, but after a few weeks I was saddened by the low amount of clicks and earnings on my adsense. It looked like it drastically dropped. So I felt hey maybe that's just how it is. So after a couple of months, I went into a deep depression. I was paying for their expensive VPS server, and my earnings were nothing more than 75 to 100 dollars a month. every day I would only earn a couple of cents with over 3,000 visitors. Something wasn't right. So I asked my friend too look at my website, I had a strong suspicion something was wrong, and he look at the coding and said someone put Disallows on all of your google bots, he changed my google news sitemap with a new one, and after putting up a few articles, my earnings increased. I was earning over 25 dollars a day again. Before I would get around 5 to 10 thousand visitors but only earn 1 to 3 dollars. So apparently they just disallowed the majority of googlebots, and ad bots so my site wouldn't crash.
Very unprofessional of Hostgator to disable the bots and not tell you that they have done so. Plenty of good hosts out there who would be more than happy to have your service, so if you want to move your not stuck for choice.
You can just pretend don't know and ask them what they do to correct your problem. From there, you can ask them what is the impact. Let see what is their answer.
search engine bots will generated massive traffic to your host bandwidth, especially if you have lots of articles. if you are using google webmasters tools, then you can adjust the google bot crawl rate, so that it won't generated too much traffic. so, when you asked for support, of course they were finding out the cause and help you to disallow the bot in order to prevent traffic spike. so, nothing wrong they did, except they did not tell you what they have done, this seems that not professional enough.
Exactly, they didn't tell me what they had done. And it cost me lots of Adsene earnings. I was even paying for their expensive VPS server. I was barely making enough each month to pay for it. Before I would earn a good amount of money each month. This isn't right at all. They need to realize the majority of blog or website owners, make most of their money threw adsense and pay per click services. For several months I was getting low earnings. Not enough to earn a living it was very low. One month I only earned 25 dollars that whole month! and my traffic was showing a lot of visitors. It didn't add up at all. I even thought Google was just denying me of earnings and other bloggers so they could buy out different businesses, but most other people said their earnings remained the same or actually increase..I found that strange because while they increased mine decreased drastically.
If they are modifying code on your webpages without you knowing and without telling you they're doing it, that's more than just a minor support issue. That is a VERY, VERY serious issue. Me personally? I would bill them for every minute it takes to get your site back to how it was, and when they don't pay, take them to small claims court to make a point. They can't just go changing your code like that.
Hostgator sucks! Check my thread about it here how SNEAKY they are http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1844891 Besides that i am still with them (i had a 3 years shared hosting contract). The experiences are HORRIBLE. EX-TR-EM-ELY slow website. Guys from the live support chat are very helpful anyway but it sucks if you have to contact them very often that your (basic Wordpress) websites are down. They are really overselling their servers and you don't get what you pay for. Unlimited sites, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth. Yeah lots of blabla promises but it all sucks if your sites are down or terribly slow MOST OF THE TIME! STAY AWAY FROM HOSTGATOR! Seriously!
It seems like I have been hearing more and more of this with HostGator. They have some customers that are extremely happy, but then I hear just as many unhappy customers as well. They really should put more of an effort in to customer service, it would do wonders for them.
Its totally un professional why they do such kind of acts, while they are a large hosting company, and well know across the world ??
basically they put delay code in your robot txt - that is only for google slow crawel and i don't think it can slow down visitor / sites or any adsense. But hostgator servers are not powerful so they suggesting such solutions. Even i pay heavy amount every month for VPS but reply is same upgrade to higher level. They never dig to the problem n don't have alert / monitor system even if your VPS is totally down.
Oh wow! What a nightmare. Thanks for sharing. I haven't used HostGator for hosting yet but I hadn't really heard anything that bad about them yet. Good to know.
HostGator is really unprofessional, they find ways to attract customers towards them. I'm nothappy that HostGator does not satisfy customers, they are to make a profit for their