What should of been a relaxing and computer free holiday for Cuzoogle turned into a real mess that ate up a lot of free time that should of been used for relaxing with a cold one.

The day was all taken care of with some early blog work so my American readers (and World) would still have something to read while they were at work.

The plan to post a Canadian 2-4 of celebrity babes seemed to be the best idea so then the hits would come while I spent the day doing other things. The plan almost went off without a hitch.

The link was spread all around the Internet and was ready for consumption. My man Jimmy Traina over at SI.com as I knew he would even linked us up and it was time for the 3rd straight Monday of massive page views.

Then the phone rang.

It was about 11:30am local time and I was busy trying to figure out how the kitchen sink at Cuzoogle HQ had become clogged. I was juggling that, making breakfast and ignoring a moaning dog that really wanted to go for a walk. I thought the day was going to fall into place nicely.

I answered the phone and it was Host Gator, the company that hosts this blog and all of my other sites. They were telling me that I had been shutdown due to over usuage on my shared server. Right then I knew that SI.com had hit me.

The annoying part was I thought this issue had been fixed, I had withstood large traffic spikes before and thought everything was golden.

Up to the computer and I found out I was completely locked out of my account. Now this is where things get silly.

The dude at HG emailed me to say that traffic was through the roof and that I should think about installing the WP supercache plugin and that should do the trick. Here is the problem. They told me what to but did not give me that option to do it since I was locked out.

It took me about an hour to explain that to the slow and useless online support folks. They kept telling me the problem but did not understand I had no way to fix it.

Finally they let my IP address access the site and install the plugin. Crossing fingers. Then the site was up for like a minute and down again. Too much traffic. Keep in mind this company markets unlimited traffic with the plan I am on (if you read the fine print of course it is not true).

In the time I got to see everything live it was amazing. In about a minute there were 2000 views and the site was exploding with possible revenue. The headline and blurb over at Hot Clicks was great and it should of been the best day of Cuzoogle ever.

I then went and did other things trying to figure out what to do next. Walking the dog and trying to have a conversation with your girlfriend is hard when you are thinking about your blog and how to fix it.

Once back I finally decided to pull the plug and email Jimmy. The link got taken down (booo) and everything finally was restored to order just after 5pm local time.

Now here is what pissed me off and since has caused me to change hosts.

The friendly (ha) admin guy at Host Gator actually said that if he enabled the site and it crashed again because of the heavy traffic he would ban my account forever. Forever without another warning. So I am basically supposed to try and grow my blog and hope I don’t succeed?

In a market of several top hosting companies I can’t believe they did not want to work with me or help me or even try to be nice about it.

Since asking around, other companies have very similar plans but they say right off the bat they will never pull a site down. They instead will work with me to fix the solution and not nail me for having success.

In all my dealings with Host Gator they actually do their best to take your sites Host-age and then bully you into taking a bigger plan. I am not ready for a dedicated server at hundreds of dollars a month. One day maybe but it should not be an issue at this time.

I know of many other sites that are bigger than mine, get more traffic and they are not on dedicated servers.

So that was my day. I hope you got to see the 2-4 pack of babes and the pictures of Tony Parker that were supposed to be comical BEFORE last night’s Game Seven.

I will update you with what company I went with and how that all went once the transfer is complete.

Thank you Jimmy Traina and thank you to the wonderful folks over at my new host for doing their best to make me feel like a valued customer.

Don’t use Host Gator if you ever want to grow.

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