I promised to write a little more about my own successes this past Christmas and here it is, with a cautionary tale.
Without a doubt, my star performing product was the Go Go Hamster, now rebranded as Zhu Zhu Hamster. I spotted its potential to be a winner at an early stage way back in May of last year before it had even hit the stores over here. On the back of my strong hunch, I purchased several related domains and started building the sites … all based on WordPress platforms.
It didn’t take much at that stage to rank well for the keywords and I was looking forward to rubbing my hands with glee … if only my hunch proved correct.
Things were going reasonably OK but slower that hoped for until October. Some of that was stock shortage, but also that we were not into the peak buying spell at that time. I was happily moderating comments across several Go Go Hamster sites with no issue.
Then on 28 October …. all hell broke loose with the Toy Retailers Association announcing their dream dozen toys for Christmas 2009 and the Go Go Hamsters had made it into the list. That wasn’t entirely a surprise because I had carried out extensive research, looking at the US reaction to their launch earlier in the year and also spoke to the UK importer for sales and stock info.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the sudden hits on my sites, the additional comments to be moderated and responded to. I made a quick decision to consolidate my weaker sites and 301 redirect to a common domain. One fly in the ointment was that there was a rebrand imminent from Go Go Hamster to Zhu Zhu Hamster … I made a decision to go for longer term benefit and pushed out my reserve domain imemdiately as a stockchecker, capitalising on stock shortages. However, by now competition was becoming fierce with other domains popping up by the barrowload.
What was my Unique Selling Point to make people visit my site? Actually, I had two :
1. I checked more stores than anyone … even if it didn’t earn me a commission, and
2. My robot checked the stock status more frequently than anyone else …. every minute
I had good hosting plans, but none wanted to touch 60 second crons to do stock-checks and I already had experience that when people got a sniff of stock via forums, they would descend on my site like locusts looking to ravage the Go Go Hamster stock and the site would crawl.
I actually moved my sites on three occasions before settling on tsohost as the latest in a line of providers …. and I never looked back.
What was different about tsohost? Well for starters, my site never missed a beat throughout the onslaught. Their clustered solution means that loads are not shared on a single server but across several, not just for the webserver, but email and other services.
The cluster is also unique in that it offers Linux AND Windows hosting within that single hosting package all administered within a single control panel.
tsohost have designed this system to be burstable with no degradation of service … e.g. should you be Slashdotted OR in my case Go Go Hamstered. One major Retailer Affiliate Manager actually contacted me to tell me that their site was crashing under the load that I was referring even although my site stayed resilient. They were actually contemplating offering me a reward to STOP referring. I think that speaks volumes for Tsohosts clustered solution that it could stay up when retailer sites could not cope.
If I had one small negative, it would be that the MySQL servers are configured for an ft_min_word_len of 4 characters. If your site relies on something smaller, then this will not work for you. However, I was so impressed by the speed and knowledgability of the support that I took on a separate tsohost managed VPS to dedicate as my own database server (specially configured by tsohost at no extra charge) with MySQL configured to my own extra demands.
For £19.99 per month (£199.99 annually giving ~2 months free), you will have these features available via tsohost clustered hosting :
* Host up to 100 websites
* 100GB of fast, secure storage for your files
* 1000GB of monthly data transfer
* Deploy Windows and Linux hosting from the same control panel
* Automatic Load Balancing
* PHP5 scripting support
* Perl scripting support
* ASP .NET 1, 2 and 3.5 SP1
* Ruby on Rails support New
* MySQL databases
* MSSQL databases (1 database licence included as standard)
* Full email with POP3, IMAP, Webmail
* E-mail forwarding and auto responders
* Advanced spam filtering
* SMTP Relay
* SSH and Cron Jobs (online control)
* SSL support (certificate required)
* Support by ticket, e-mail and telephone
I remain hugely impressed to the extent that I will be migrating more of my sites over to my tsohost hosting solution. I can’t commend the solution highly enough to you … it may prove to be an effective alternative to expensive dedicated servers. It certainly was in my case.
Tso Host for Inexpensive Scalable ‘In the Cloud’ Clustered Hosting
**New** tsohost have provided us with discount code TENPERCENT which is valid on all shared hosting accounts – this gives 10% off for the life of the account when entered at the checkout.
Update on Script Compatability (where known):
Price Tapestry does not use FullText where words are smaller than 4 characters and will therefore be compatible with the Clustered Hosting.
Affilistore does use FullText and will therefore not be compatible without accepting that shorter words will not be found.
I have spoken with tsohost regarding the current setting and they have indicated that it is not viable to lower the minimum char len for existing servers on the cluster as this could impact existing customers; however, they will consider for new MySQL servers as they are added.
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