Link Bait gone wrong

Just thought I'd make a little post about what we done and how we messed it up. We had an idea to improve our sports site on two fronts - both drive some traffic too it, and build some nice backlinks.

I had a contact who works for a brewery, we got a load of branded soccer balls from them for pretty much next to nothing. We agreed we would cover shipping and post them out, taking applications from our site. The brewer gets some nice publicity and doesnt need to waste man-hours or post/packing costs, and we get some traffic and publicity.

Anyway I put up a page on the site for people to fill in their address.

Within 12 hours, my stats were showing about 65 thousand page views. I dont know how high it would have went - we got kicked off our host, for apparently using too much server resources. It was on a reseller.

We werent running any complicated scripts or anything, so its dissapointing to say the least to get canned simply for a lot of page views - we were way under our bandwidth allowance.

Since it went a bit wonky I cant really post the url here. I've heard of peoples sites crashing from digg first page, but no way thought I was in danger of being overwhelmed with this. I did understimate things, but I think more of the blame is on Godaddy for canning me with no real reason.

Anyone else got any link baiting horror stories?

 

dude that is crazy, i would have shit a chicken if my host kicked me for doing well. I could understand a warning and maby some sort of agreement for payment if it was to continue.

They must be some backyard operation running on a 386sx and 4mb ram.

 

Excellent plan! Live and learn, next time pay a little extra for no bandwidth cap


Cheers,


H

 

Yeah but the problem is I never went over my allocated bandwidth. They said "server usage" was the problem. I'm in my bed right now but when I'm at the pc tommorow I'll post the exact email. Its a cop-out really, they hugely oversell things, knowing most wont use anything close to what they are allocated. Yet when you do start using what is rightfully yours, they threaten you, or in this case cut you off with no warning!

Its cost us a bit of money in postage etc, and buying the stuff in. Shame we never got the full benefits from it, but just one of those things I cant change that now.

 

wow 65,000 page views in 12hours... man that is crazy!

 

My sites have gotten on the front pages of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Delicious and some other bigboys.
A few months ago my server used to fold like a french army. It was dedicated and costed about $99 per month. However, I felt I was missing out on alot of opportunity so I upgraded my server (quad core, 4gig ram etc.) which costs now me $179. Although it costs more, its definitely worth it because I sell more of my products and more people stick around.

I have once been on front page Digg, Slashdot and Del.icio.us all at the same time.. man the server was hurting.

 

Ouch. Did you move to a new host?

 

Back on the same hosting account now that its calmed down. We'll need to move it if we're going to do that again though.

 

personaly, i'd move to a different host, what they did was pretty unprofessional and what is to stop them from doing it again ?
maybe go vps if your budget allows it, alot more resources, and your semi in charge (to a point).

 

Can't seem to edit my first post - It was Hostgator that was the host, not Godaddy. I've got several reseller accounts and made a mistake there.

I'm looking into the hosting situation now, I might go with a dedicated server and put all my high value sites on it, keeping the resellers for adsense sites, and sites that exist to drive traffic to main ones.

 

Lol, you got kicked for doing well. If that ever happened to me I would get really pissed and go crazy and tell everyone I can that the host really sucked.

 

Always sad to loose good traffic. During last years World Cup in Germany one of my sites had around 100-150K pageviews a day on a 1$ a month hosting plan - and I was in Germany watching the WC so I could not more the site to another server. I had my hosting company in my prayers every night at the hotel, that and a couple of sweet talking mails did the job

Nice to make $10K in one month on that site with $1 in expenses

/askhoej