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Server Fault or Nameserver Fault?

for a 75% drop ..

old_expat

3:21 am on Mar 10, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Last month I experienced a disaster. The company hosting my VPS for 5 years disappeared. I had actually been expecting it. Their normally outstanding support went dead even though the server was still alive.

So I had ordered a new VPS from a top-rated hosting company. I had a few glitches transferring things over but nothing extreme.

One issue was Nameservers.

The old company had given me 4 nameservers to add to my domains at my domain registry company. The new company created 2 nameservers for me to add.

Same domain registrar.

Problem: 75% drop in income in 1 month (I've been with Adsense since the beginning)

Something is very wrong, and because I really don't understand DNS, nameservers, etc, I don't know where the problem lies.

I recently ran reports on 'dnsever' and they say my nameserves are okay. That makes me think that the problem is with the host.

I have about 20 lightweight sites on a managed CPanel VPS with 1 gig ram, and supposedly way too much bandwidth. (my old VPS used Webmin).

Server shows:

System information
Server load 0.17 (16 CPUs)
Memory Used 19.2% (201,360 of 1,048,576)
Swap Used 0% (0 of 1)

Any opinions or tests I should run?

I need help!

phranque

2:17 pm on Mar 10, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

is GWT reporting anything relevant and interesting?
have you checked your server access and error log files for clues?
are you canonicalizing your hostname properly?
have you checked your analytics to see how and where traffic has changed since the hosting change?

old_expat

4:49 am on Mar 11, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

GWT?

I honestly don't know how to read logs and interpet clues

Canonicalizing?

I don't have analytics, just AWStats and Google Webmaster Tools.

The decreased revenue is across all 20 sites.

In this scenario, only 2 (major) things have changed. The server and associated, the nameservers.

Basicially I'm looking for a "best guess" as to whether I need a different hosting company.

phranque

9:02 am on Mar 11, 2013 (gmt 0)

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10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

GWT = Google Webmaster Tools

AWStats is based on server access log files.

any best guess should be based on the best information available.
what is GWT reporting?
have you tried "fetch as googlebot" in GWT?
what kinds of errors and redirects are being reported by AWStats?
what is adsense telling you about which pages are causing the drop in income?
are you getting a drop in traffic to those pages?
is the CTR decreasing?
perhaps the clicks are paying less...

old_expat

11:42 am on Mar 11, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

GWT is reporting that 1 (and only 1) of the sites, which happens to be a .co.uk can't access robots.txt.

A report on intodns says: "WARNING: Looks like the parent servers do not have information for your TLD when asked. This is ok but can be confusing."

I get thst same error on the other .co.uk site is spidering just fine.

Traffic is generally off about 25% on the larger sites. This is going on 2 months.

No other DNS errors or obvious connectivity problems on any but the 1 site referenced above.

As for CPR & CPC, I don't have very much data because of the short time on the new server, but:

1st 10 days in Jan (old server) 1.52 ctr .42 cpc
1st 10 days in Mar (new server) 1.72 ctr .35 cpc

Musicarl

2:38 pm on Mar 12, 2013 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I would guess server fault. There are a lot of things that could be misconfigured (redirects, maybe?) that could cause speed and accessibility issues. You might want to get your host to help pin down the problem.