It is not often you get to see us SEO being humble and admit that we did something wrong – but nonetheless we do and often. My case is that I am actually a victim of my own success. While it sounds like a good thing it did cause a lot of havoc, at the very “best” inconvenient time that it could possible happen – end of month and time to generate reports and review these for quality assurance.

Now before I explain what happened I will explain the way I operate to ensure that I do delivery quality SEO. As most of my clients are less than savvy with the SEO technology I take the end of the month to “translate” all the SEO data, links generated, visits gained or lossed, compare achievements in conversions, translate the result of this months landing page results and delivering verdicts on what pages we continue with and what pages we take away. To be able to handle all this data I require three computers as there is so much data to handle and the processing of some of the larger accounts takes over 30 minutes to just close.

Now in the midst of this processing my old web hosting decided to take a dive, create a ton of bugs and become generally inconvenient. Regrettably it took them over 24 hours to find out what they had FUBARed. While some technical glitches are expected to happen every now and then, it is less practical for us in the SEO industry to have down time, specially when it is the main form of promotion used.

Now there is a crucial lesson to be learned from this.

I take it that the more experienced of us always takes backups… and in some cases even backups of the backups. just in case, you know.

What I had not been prepared for in this case was that I would generate such successes with my “trial and error” websites. I have about 10 websites with which I run constant tests and use them for different SEO purposes, you may even use some of them on a daily basis as they in no way give away the fact that the users are being tested while they are being provided with useful content that they are interested in.

On average these “trial and error” websites shoot off within 2 months to have about 2500 to 4000 daily visits.

Now be honest, how many websites do you have with that amount of traffic?

If you do, have you ever backed up the content, prepared the 301 and crossed your fingers that your web hosting won’t topple over?

I guessed not, and neither did I to be fully honest.

But it happened.

Now I have had to spend the last couple of days moving accounts, swapping URLs and changes name servers to transfer my websites to new hosting. I have however learned my lesson and now I also have prepared an escape from this hosting as well should they decide to drop out. I am wondering how many of you SEO out there that have stumbled upon similar trouble. How did you sort it out?