Things don’t go smooth when you try to do something better with your on-line presence. Our web site and blog both went down today. The timing couldn’t have been worst. We were running an off-line campaign and as we started to measure the impact – Bang! the site was down.
Lessons:
Last time when we moved from Blogger to WordPress we saw a rapid drop in SERP, this time the same thing happened. About an hour later the number of impressions went down ten times. The new search-engine algorithms are really smart. They care for the users. If a site is down – the site disappears from the results fast.
cPanel transfer was really smooth. When the issue did not get resolved after waiting for few hours we decided to move the host. It was very easy to restore the complete site from last backup. The last post was not there but long-live Google Cache – did not take much time to restore the whole post.
Attempts were made to restore the old post in the mySQL but adding a new line is easy, just that WP did not want to pull it from the DB. Therefore copy past was used.
Now we have a new IP address. Some redirection issues are there. Overall the sites are up and running again. Less visitors, less hits, DNS propagation takes years but we are still happy to report that it is up.
We are sincerely sorry for the mess but things happen.
