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If you visited WestEastonPA.com over the last few days you ran into a notice that the website was unavailable. I was transferring this website to a new hostserver and the moving of all the files, folders and the database took time.

I’m sure some would have preferred it didn’t return, yet, it still lives.

But, here’s why I made the move.

Like most people, I’m cutting back on expenses. Hopefully, using a new hostserver doesn’t affect the response time of this site.

Over the last 8 years I was paying $100/month for a hosting service that, when I first began paying for it, was needed. With over 200 websites at one point I needed a hosting service that could provide the memory, speed, and bandwidth I needed to keep them all running smoothly. The income those sites generated more than paid for the hosting service.

Then things changed in 2009. The “Overlord” (Google) ranked websites using a new algorithm that gave large corporate websites an unfair advantage in its search engine. Google called it “Panda.” I and the rest of us making money at home with websites called it much worse. Google even gave those who used their blog program (Blogspot) better rankings in search returns than websites using a website program other than their own.

Where I once had many websites appearing on page 1 or 2 of Google returns, they suddenly ranked beyond page 10 of Google and continued to get buried deeper.

When that happens you get less visitors (how many of you go beyond page 3 of a Google search before clicking on a link?) and with less visitors I generated less income.

I have far less websites now than at my peak. For the last few years I’ve been paying for an expensive service that I no longer needed and decided to go back to the hostserver I began with in 2006, when I launched my very first website. Rather than paying $100 each month, I’m paying under $10. That’s a lot of scratch back in my pocket, over an entire year.

My only concern is that WestEastonPA.com may be slower in loading pages. I use a base website script from WordPress and then work the coding to change the appearance of my websites to fit whatever the website is intended to present. It usually becomes an even heavier user of resources and memory than the original WordPress coding requires.

So far, I haven’t seen a slowdown of the site, but your mileage may vary.

It’s possible you may see changes in the design of WestEastonPA.com from time to time. That will be me experimenting with WordPress designs that may be faster than the one you were accustomed to seeing (the home page of that design is especially “heavy” due to the many small images that it has to load).

I should note that with any transfer to a new hostserver there are often some bugs that can develop. I did a very quick check of much of the site and found a couple of minor issues I need to correct, but there is likely something I may have missed. If you find anything not functioning correctly, please contact me and I will look at the coding to see if a file was corrupted during the transfer.