I’ve Moved to a New Neighborhood

Not literally, although you might think so given that our house was flooded. I’ve moved out of a slummy Internet neighborhood and into an upscale, posh neighborhood.

After more than eight years of being on the Internet, and over a year with niche stores, I finally made the decision to purchase a reseller’s hosting account. There were several reasons for my decision.  And, no, I do not plan on starting a hosting service.  My reseller account is all for me.

eBay Banned Me

While I am not 100% certain of this, I am pretty sure that my shared hosting IP address was banned by eBay.  I have one niche store that consistently brings in sales every day.  It took about two weeks of no sales for me to notice that I was no longer getting sales, or even clicks, but I finally realized this fact.  

Once this fact came to my attention I went to eBay’s EPN and created a report for the entire month of October on this one site.  Sure enough, every day had clicks, bids, and earnings, until around the 20th of the month.  Then, nothing.  Not a single click.

Next, I visited my site to see if it had gone down.  Nope, it was still working.  But something didn’t look right.  However, I didn’t realize what was wrong for about two more days.

Sometimes I just need to ponder something for a few days, and that was true in this case.  The next time I returned to my site I finally realized what was wrong.  There were no eBay auctions showing on any page.

Now, some of you might wonder why it took me so long to realize this.  The site in question is one I heavily modified.  Had this been a BANS out of the box site, I’m sure I would have realized the problem immediately.  But this site doesn’t resemble a BANS out of the box site at all.  

As soon as I realized there were no results I logged a support ticket with BANS (which, I’m sorry to say, still hasn’t been answered, but perhaps their answer got lost in my spam box…).  I also did a search on Google regarding this.  I found that I wasn’t alone in this problem.  

It seems that eBay has taken to banning IP addresses that it deems bad.  I cannot say what their definition of bad is, but my guess is they ban IP addresses that are known to run illegal or spammy sites.  And, since my site was on a shared hosting plan, it was very likely that my site was sharing Internet real estate with some of these bad sites.  Which would explain why my site no longer returned any auctions.

I had a few other niche stores on this same hosting account.  When I checked them, I found that they, too, showed no results.  This just helped confirm this thought to me of being banned.

Plugin Problems

Perhaps some of you remember when this site went down because of a plugin I was using.  The reason my site was shut down was because I took up too many of the shared resources.  With a reseller account I won’t have to worry about that happening.  My resources are my resources.  I can use them any way I see fit and there is no one but me in charge of my hosting resources.  Ah, the freedom!

Concerns about Hacking

I’m not going to say that my sites won’t get hacked with a reseller hosting account, but I believe the chance is greatly minimized.  I have learned that my sites can be hacked if someone else’s sites on my shared hosting account get hacked.  

I don’t understand the specifics of how this happens, but my understanding is that if someone else has low or no protection (or even an outdated program, such as WordPress), that hackers can use this loophole to get ‘in’ to a shared hosting IP address, and then visit all the sites on that shared IP address. 

With my own reseller account, since I am the only one on the account.  I am much more secure (as long as I keep the software on my sites up-to-date!).

But, the Cost…

It was the cost the kept me from switching to a reseller hosting account for so many years.  However, after being banned by eBay and having my site shutdown because it was a resource hog, I considered the fact that I have been earning a minimum of $200 each month for the last year.  I decided that the cost of $25/month for reseller hosting was in my budget and well worth the peace of mind.  Who knows how much I lost in revenue because of the IP banning.  I no longer need to worry about that.

I had already paid for three-years with HostGator.  When I decided to upgrade to a reseller’s account HostGator kindly applied my prepaid funds to my new hosting account.  They even moved all my sites (addons and subdomains) for me to my new account.

There were a few hiccups during the moving process, but I can say that HostGator has been great about quickly responding to each issue that has come up.  

Rochelle