Despite another increase in user growth, income continues to be on the decline. I made $211.64 in August compared to July’s $220.73. It’s a small difference, but an annoying difference given the trend.

Other than diversifying, revenue is something beyond my control. It’s yet another reason why I prefer to focus on user growth rather than income. I can’t control the advertising rates, or how interested users are in the ads (how shoppy, clicky they are), but I can continue to work on a really cool site that attracts lots of daily users. Once I have a built in audience, it’ll be easier to attract ad dollars by diversifying.

Overall I had a 7.5% growth in users. Even with Anonymous’ DDoS attack on my hosting company, in which I was collateral damage, I did have a stronger second half of the month. Most of the month was stagnant user growth, but it started to pick up in the last two weeks so I’m hopeful for a strong September showing. The Miscarriage reasurer audience nearly doubled this month, and the Miscarriage Chart audience increased by nearly 40%. The writing tools are down a bit, I’ll have to look into that.

The DDoS attack has me considering my exposure to future issues in my current setup. Once upon a time switching webhosts in my case required little more than copying a folder from one destination to another. Back then it wasn’t uncommon for a webhost’s uptime to start to fluctuate, or drop dramatically. Being nimble was a necessity. I designed my sites knowing I might switch hosts every year or two. I’ve been on Dreamhost just over a decade now and grown accustomed to letting them managing all my domain and subdomain configurations, as well as database set ups and all the rests. There are undoubtedly other issues I haven’t even thought of. Switching hosts, should the need arise, would likely not be seamless.

While I don’t expect DDoS of this scale to occur with any regularity, I am growing and that could mean outgrowing my current host setup. I need to figure out what it would take to move, even if it’s just from shared hosting to dedicated hosting and not from company to company.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft