If you are like me, you are constantly loading up your blog and checking to see if it still runs smoothly.  In fact, I have my blogs set as my browser’s home page so whenever I load up Firefox, they show up in front of me.  Some people would find this excessive and annoying but for me, it works and here’s why.

Yesterday, I found MoneyNing and OC Golf Course taking over a minute to load while my other blogs were running fine.  It didn’t occur to me that it wouldn’t be the hosting company’s fault because all my blogs are on the same server, so I called my hosting company immediately.

To my surprised, tech support picked up my call instantly so I explained the situation to him.  He quickly looked into the problem and basically told me that it might be the problem with some of the wordpress plugins that I’m running because certain sites are running fine while others are not.  I was not happy about this but after thinking about it for a little bit, I realize that they are probably right.  I just have to figure this out myself.

I look through the list of plugins in my wordpress admin area instantly stopped when I got to the SezWho plugin.  It was only days since I installed this plugin and the only two blogs that have this was the two that are running terribly slow!  I deactivated it and sure enough, it was running smoothly again. Problem solved, and a few hours of down time saved because I was on top my blogs.

Another incident happened today (what a weekend) where only half of the page on the same two blogs would load properly.  Looking at the bottom toolbar, it showed “Connecting to entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com”. Entrecard related again I thought. I took the code for my Entrecard out on MoneyNing and again, it worked like a charm. As an experiment of what the effects would be since OC Golf Course is still new and doesn’t get a ton of traffic, I left the widget on and continued to let the blog be handicapped until Entrecard (or really Amazon Web Services) fixes the problem.

Here’s a chart and what I found:

As you can see, I got 11 visitors in the 7 hours window that the Entrecard service was down today when the site gets around 300 visitors a day (12-13 on average per hour). If anything, the same period should be the busiest period so as a result, I am forecasting about 1/3 of traffic lost for today which includes all potential earnings lost. Luckily I found out as soon as it went down because it would be a much bigger problem for me if it was one of my bigger sites.

Moral of the story? Monitor your blogs or else you are leaving money on the table.