Manu wrote about a Hacker News traffic spike and then wondered about the cost affect a link could have to other sites. I’d love to reassure Manu that if he linked to my site and real people visited I’d be happy to pay some extra to my hosting company for some real possibly interested traffic.
You likely haven’t noticed but I left WP Engine. I haven’t written about it because I don’t want to give fuel to the turd running WordPress thinking that WPE is bad. I’m firmly against Matt in this fight, but still WPE was a pain in Sept/Oct this year.
They measure traffic “different” than any analytics package and over Sept/Oct I got enough traffic to make my regular $80/month bill turn into a $230 bill for Sept and a $1000 bill for October1. I saw no email sign ups and no analytics traffic in the three different places I could see it on my site so as far as I can tell it’s random bots doing weird shit on my site that WPE didn’t detect and block.
I see this type of activity all the time at my full time job where I run a small web host for around 100 organizations. We see a site get a sudden huge flood of traffic and then we check it out within about 20 minutes because our tools detect it. The traffic is always some type of huge flood and we can pinpoint the country it comes from. Since these organizations are firmly for US visitors only we simply block the country for 24 hours which shuts down the thousands of erroneous visits to a site.
Despite arguing with WPE for a month and trying to show them that this wasn’t legitimate traffic to my site but spam traffic they missed, I paid them $1000 and moved my sites to Digital Ocean with my domain going through CloudFlare. I don’t get any monitoring of my server now (though the WPE managed WordPress hosting did me little good obviously) but I can set custom cost numbers in Digital Ocean so I get an alert if I go over $25/month.
So now instead of paying a regular $80/month I’m paying $12/month for more sites hosting on Digital Ocean and I have more control over what my server does and have a few fun personal projects I’ll be messing with this year.
TLDR: I love traffic from real users and will pay for it. Shitty bot traffic sucks and I don’t want that.
- This is in Canadian dollars but they charge in USD. ↩︎