GoDaddy Webhosting/Domains

[Ryan McGinnis]

Yeah - definately watch the bandwidth overages. They are arguably criminal in what they can charge. I know of a case where a site used 2.2TB on a 500GB limit one month. They never shut the site down or even sent a friendly notice saying 'you are approaching your limit' or 'you went over your limit'. Just quietly sent the $6,500 overage bill at the end of the month along with an email asking "how will you be paying for this today". In the end, they finally erased the charges, but only after much protesting and headaches.

I'm not sure, as it's been a while since I set anything up with GoDaddy, but I think there's also an option you can enable that tells them to just shut the site off if you hit the bandwidth cap, as opposed to running up overages. I agree that they, like the cellphone companies, tend to be more than a bit silly about billing if you go over the cap. Places like GoDaddy can handle mega traffic influxes, but God help the man that doesn't have a billing plan or a site switch-off setting that takes them into account!

 

[Tony Laubach]

I've been with GoDaddy since March, this thread was started in Feb; so almost a year now.

I'm confused.. it could be from me being tired... but didn't you start this thread asking if anyone used GoDaddy and that you wanted to know how good they were before you signed up for them? And now you said you've been with GoDaddy for a while.

Like I said, maybe I'm just confusing myself due to lack of sleep.. heh

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

I'm confused.. it could be from me being tired... but didn't you start this thread asking if anyone used GoDaddy and that you wanted to know how good they were before you signed up for them? And now you said you've been with GoDaddy for a while.

Like I said, maybe I'm just confusing myself due to lack of sleep.. heh

I brought it back out since I was giving godaddy servers a good test right now, perhaps you should quote me in this confusion. I figured it might be useful info and didn't feel like a whole new thread was needed....so I searched.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

I've been with GoDaddy since March, this thread was started in Feb; so almost a year now.

LOL... gotcha, like I said.. lack of sleep.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Heh... my GOD Mike is getting an enormous traffic-pounding. I'm getting 3,000 unique visitors a day just from people clicking the link to my site that he's got up on one of his pages. You can almost hear the internet buckling as you load his site.

Someone on the corporate intranet forwarded me a link to his site today, too. I think the viral email thing can actually drive more traffic than Digg, Fark, and Reddit combined.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Yeah it's sort of nuts again, but I'm not sure it's more than the Aurora 04 chain mail yet. I'm sort of scared it is going that direction and I now have far more images on the site and most are larger. GoDaddy is still chucking right along though.

I am having one problem with GoDaddy I thought I'd mention. I saw updated stats info on the 2nd, then nothing till I e-mailed them. They fixed it and I then saw new stuff on the 6th. It's broken again and not updating. I e-mailed again and am waiting to see if it gets fixed again and for good. It's making monitoring bandwidth rather impossible, which makes me wonder. Using google adsense page impression/hits numbers I used 187 gigs after the first 400,000 page impressions(I paired those up using my one stats viewing on the 6th). Those are now over 1,600,000 for January. So using those together I get to under 800 gigs, but a pace to go over 2,000(the most they sell). If my site goes bye bye, I took it down to keep away from that limit as overages scare me. It is sort of amazing what it takes to go over 2,000 gigs with only images on a site.

If one thinks about it, it is not that hard to have this happen to any chaser site. If you catch something cool and it gets posted in one spot it can snowball. One may not care for google ads, but if it happens to you I'd at least have them ready to go as a temporary deal. It's pretty impressive right now, even with very low click ratios. They also help you monitor traffic when you can't see them via your host

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

If you need an emergency measure, you can always pay $29 for an unlimited year-long Flickr account, upload all of your currently linked photos, and then hotlink all the images. The images would still load on your page (meaning you can continue to collect the Adsense revenue), but the image bandwidth would be coming from Flickr. Flickr will allow unlimited hotlinking of photos, so long as clicking the photo takes you to the Flickr site (which is actually cool, since it takes you to YOUR personal Flickr gallery, which gives you more exposure.) I've never tried mass-hotlinking Flickr images before, but it's definately allowed and Flickr is run by Yahoo, so you won't run into any lack-of-bandwidth problems.

For example, the below images are actually hosted by Flickr. They could be any size at all -- up to thousands of pixels wide. Flickr doesn't care, it's up to you; the only limit they have is that the filesize must be under 10MB.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/148/339326664_1a1f2f1426.jpg

All you have to do is copy the text in the box and paste it onto your site.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/143/351061130_3013358701_o.jpg

Pretty nifty.

 

[Mike Umscheid]

Heh... my GOD Mike is getting an enormous traffic-pounding. I'm getting 3,000 unique visitors a day just from people clicking the link to my site that he's got up on one of his pages. You can almost hear the internet buckling as you load his site.

Someone on the corporate intranet forwarded me a link to his site today, too. I think the viral email thing can actually drive more traffic than Digg, Fark, and Reddit combined.

It will be interesting watching my website stats as well over the next few weeks/months, as I'm getting record traffic thanks to Mike H. Over the last three days, my site has had an average of 6000 visits/day. To put in comparison, in the month of December, I averaged 360 visits/day. I have never had this kind of traffic.. traffic largely from Hollingshead's links alone. I'm noticing more traffic from posts on various message boards across the 'net that are posting a link (or hotlinking an image) to my website. Dryline Hosting has been pretty stable the past few days, which is promising.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Well I just had to call godaddy on this stats thing, and of course, I call, wait, get through, wait, talk to someone that knows and it is now working for them. Hmmmm I had just checked and it wasn't! This was after waiting 36 hours after my second e-mail on this(they fixed it the first time and it happened again, so I sent the second one).

So I thought I'd ask them about bandwidth options. You can't setup your site to shut off before you reach your limit. So I asked what it costs if you go over. They had a pre-purchase price and an after the fact price. You don't want to go over. It is $1.50/gig over if bought before hand. It is $2/gig after the fact. So if you go over by 500 gigs....wala.....$1000. It seems crazy you can get a deal for 2,000 gigs a month at $15, but if you go over by 1/4 of that(500 gigs) that costs you another grand.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Well I just had to call godaddy on this stats thing, and of course, I call, wait, get through, wait, talk to someone that knows and it is now working for them. Hmmmm I had just checked and it wasn't! This was after waiting 36 hours after my second e-mail on this(they fixed it the first time and it happened again, so I sent the second one).

So I thought I'd ask them about bandwidth options. You can't setup your site to shut off before you reach your limit. So I asked what it costs if you go over. They had a pre-purchase price and an after the fact price. You don't want to go over. It is $1.50/gig over if bought before hand. It is $2/gig after the fact. So if you go over by 500 gigs....wala.....$1000. It seems crazy you can get a deal for 2,000 gigs a month at $15, but if you go over by 1/4 of that(500 gigs) that costs you another grand.

Yikes. Is the Flickr thing helping much? I'm guessing most of your traffic is Ice Storm stuff right now.

 

[Darren Addy]

Yeah, I think Mike's ice pictures have become one of those cascading emails that just goes around and around. The reason I think that is that my department secretary just sent me a Forwarded email linking to his page (she thought I might like it). Heh.

"The only thing worse than being linked-to is not being linked-to."

-- with apologies to Oscar Wilde​

 

[Zac Flamig]

Yeah it's sort of nuts again, but I'm not sure it's more than the Aurora 04 chain mail yet. I'm sort of scared it is going that direction and I now have far more images on the site and most are larger. GoDaddy is still chucking right along though.

I am having one problem with GoDaddy I thought I'd mention. I saw updated stats info on the 2nd, then nothing till I e-mailed them. They fixed it and I then saw new stuff on the 6th. It's broken again and not updating. I e-mailed again and am waiting to see if it gets fixed again and for good. It's making monitoring bandwidth rather impossible, which makes me wonder. Using google adsense page impression/hits numbers I used 187 gigs after the first 400,000 page impressions(I paired those up using my one stats viewing on the 6th). Those are now over 1,600,000 for January. So using those together I get to under 800 gigs, but a pace to go over 2,000(the most they sell). If my site goes bye bye, I took it down to keep away from that limit as overages scare me. It is sort of amazing what it takes to go over 2,000 gigs with only images on a site.

If one thinks about it, it is not that hard to have this happen to any chaser site. If you catch something cool and it gets posted in one spot it can snowball. One may not care for google ads, but if it happens to you I'd at least have them ready to go as a temporary deal. It's pretty impressive right now, even with very low click ratios. They also help you monitor traffic when you can't see them via your host

Care to share any numbers as far as adsense goes? I'm curious if all the traffic actually produces cash or not.

I also saw someplace that the number of page impressions can be low when compared to the actual number of visitors(can be 2-3x higher I've heard).

Another thing is that you talk about people actively hotlinking your images, put thought into disabling that? Afterall if they are hotlinking then they aren't seeing your ads. (Guess this was actually Mike U.)

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Care to share any numbers as far as adsense goes? I'm curious if all the traffic actually produces cash or not.

I also saw someplace that the number of page impressions can be low when compared to the actual number of visitors(can be 2-3x higher I've heard).

Another thing is that you talk about people actively hotlinking your images, put thought into disabling that? Afterall if they are hotlinking then they aren't seeing your ads. (Guess this was actually Mike U.)

I've been doing $100-$300 a month from google adsense, up to this point. I've only had one month not get to $100(the amount they'll cut you a check). Right now I'm doing that a day, lol. The first 10 days of January have amounted to just over $1000. The first few days weren't very hot either. The last couple have been over $200, though today ain't going to get there. I laughed when the first one got to $100 and was like, wouldn't this be nice to have all year round. Then a couple went over $200 and now that I'm only probably going to get to $150 today I feel a let down. Funny how that works. When I get back to normal I'm really going to be "feeling bad". The days I got over $200 I didn't have nearly as many clicks as the days I've come up short of that. Sucks the ads can be really low paying when you are getting the most clicks. You look at the clicks and want to pull your hair out at the low price per click now.

The page impression numbers match up pretty well with what the site stats show. The visitor number(about 400,000) is obviously FAR less than the page hits.

I was able to stop hotlinkers at dryline if I wanted to, but I'm not seeing how to do it at godaddy. It seems godaddy wants bandwidth eaten up. I am hoping that whole flickr route will help, just doing the ice images. I'm already over 1000 gigs for January. If you get linked up everywhere on something and a chainmail starts making the rounds, it'd probably be best to do that flickr thing mentioned on here. My file sizes are very small and I have no video on the site, and it's still chugging through it all fast.

All I can say is thank god for the google ads because nothing else is selling. One gets a bazillion hits and visitors and sells 2 dvds and a couple prints. *shrugs*

I thought I was doing well from the google ads till I found this page:
http://www.johnchow.com/index.php/the-internets-biggest-google-whores/

 

[Dan Robinson]

I'm at about $50/month with Google ads now. As Mike mentioned, they are really the only benefit to getting a lot of site traffic. It is nice to get the check every once in a while, it is at least enough to pay for hosting.

Since Adwords ads are based on a keyword bidding system, it is very unpredictable what you'll get. You are paid per click (not per 'impression' or pageview) at a rate that the buyer of the ad sets when they bid on a keyword. If it is a sought-after keyword for something specific, the click rate may be very high because several advertisers are bidding on the same keyword. If that happens, you might have a site that gets smaller amounts of traffic, but the click rates might be in the $1 to $5 each range. The higher click rates are usually associated with more specific, targeted keywords. More common keywords will yield lower click pay rates.

If you are getting a lot of traffic or anticipate it, Adsense is definately something you should sign up for.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Yikes. Is the Flickr thing helping much? I'm guessing most of your traffic is Ice Storm stuff right now.

Missed this one. I'll be able to tell on tonight's new stats update. I hope so. Thanks again for mentioning it. Are they really bandwidth proof I wonder, or is there a point they'll shut your butt off.