At the beginning of October, the server that powered the Ugidotnet blog site (and all the other sites, including the article library and the forums) had a hardware failure (2 HDD in the RAID broke at the same time and some other bad luck) and went down. And it took a few weeks before the new server arrived and the admins of the server set it up again.

As result of this failure, all the blogs stayed offline for 12 days, from the 8th to the 20th of October. My Italian blog is not my primary blog, so I didn’t care too much of the downtime period: I thought that everything would have gone back as before once the server was up again. But I was wrong: today, which is almost one month after the restore of the server, I still receive only 1/3 of the visits I received before the crash (here the last month)

What did happen? Probably Google, while refreshing its indexes, found the pages as not available and removed them from the its database. And when the site went back online it treated it as new.

Here is the graph with the visitors coming to the site before and after the crash (last 12 months, visitors by week):

Maybe now it’s too early to notice an improvement, but I don’t see a growing slope, so I guess it will take long to go back to volume of traffic I had before.

This is a warning for everybody that is serious about blogging: if you are hosting your blog on a 3rd party blogging site, be it blogs.mysuburb.org, wordpress.com or blogs.msdn.com, you are putting yourself in the situation that you can loose traffic or, even worse, all your posts because someone unplug the service or the machine crashes. (I was lucky that one of the member of the ugidotnet team downloaded the backup of subtext database just 1 day before the crash, otherwise I’ll not be complaining about the decreased traffic, but also about the loss of all my posts).

And that’s the main reason why I started this blog on my own domain and on my own hosting space.

Before someone start misreading this post, I’m not pointing the finger to the ugidotnet team, which indeed did a great job restoring everything in such a short period of time, given the fact that they are all working on their spare time.

PS: The drop in the stats is the usual traffic decrease caused by Italians going on holiday in July and August.