Like most other AM’s I use Prosper202 for my tracking. Stupidly I’ve had it sitting in a shared hosting account and never got around to upgrading.
Well, yesterday my host decided to suspend my account without notice. Traffic kept hitting the domain and going nowhere.
I was just in the process of ramping up a couple of campaigns and this glitch very quickly cost me about $1500.
I’ve now upgraded to semi-dedicated hosting and am still in the process of moving my tracker across. Fingers crossed it all works when import the database and hook everything back up, but this ain’t a fun way to waste a day.
Way to dig a hole with stinginess + laziness.
EDIT: Another day later my tracking’s truckin’ again. Funny thing was, in my post about transfering the Amazon affiliate sites I mentioned I was expecting things to go wrong when I get to importing the databases on the new domain. That time it went smoothly the first time every time. This time however thats exactly things fell to the floor with a rather loud thud. When I exported the Prosper202 database the file was about 150Mb. No way was MyPhpAdmin going to handle a dump that size. A great solution for importing large database is a free script called BigDump. You just upload it to your account and tell it which file to import into which database and off it goes. Well, almost. BigDump cannot process large tables containing extended inserts and generally you’d have the ‘extended inserts’ option turned on when doing the export, as I did. Why? Because when I exported that database again without extended inserts, instead of the previous 150Mb and was now a whopping 460Mb. Which I then had to FTP to my new hosting account, as the hours rolled by. I was thinking at this point that I’m going to spend the next 2 day on a fresh Prosper202 install, hooking all my campaigns back up to it, but to my huge relief when I uploaded BigDump did its job flawlessly. OK, it did it flawlessly on the second attempt, but we got there in the end and thats what counts. One last step – change the database settings in Prosper202 to the new database I’ve created and moment of truth… It worked, everything was back in order, campaigns unpaused. Disaster averted, think I’ll take the rest of the night off!
Albert on July 17th, 2009
1
For someone just starting out, is shared hosting still okay for a Prosper domain? Or is it necessary to begin with semi-dedicated?
MuAffiliate on July 17th, 2009
2
It will do to start with, but move it when you can afford it. another aff marketer I know (you may have come from his blog?) had the same thing happen this week – his host suspended his account and he had to move this week also. Its not that difficult to move, so you can go with shared til you have to upgrade.
AffPortal on August 13th, 2009
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GREAT point about shared hosting. I recently rented my second, this time a linux server. I will NEVER go back. The important thing to look for is a MANAGED service so you don’t have to dick around setting the server up (unless that’s your forte).
Best,
Corey
Clint Lenard on August 17th, 2009
4
That sucks that they suspended the account. I’d be furious, too!
Funny, I just went through an issue with phpMyAdmin on a new Dedicated Server. Never had an issue with it until the other day, when trying to import data from my old server, and it sent the entire machine into a downward spiral lol Luckily, my partner just SSH’d the DB right in…