Forum Moderators: phranque
What happens when things get a little too hectic?
Has anyone had situations where their webhosts' disk space capacity wasn't able to handle a new surge in site traffic?
What about website inquiries where your visitors may need to contact you? Not enough people to handle the phones? No one to respond to the 15 email accounts you have setup?
Do you just throw up your hands and start hiring help?
The path I chose was to scale back the total number of clients and increase my fees. I was able to decrease the total work load, increase my quality and that allowed me to pick up new higher paying clients. Now I'm slowly getting back to the original problem of more work than hours in the day, but the portfolio is much better as is the billing. Instead of hiring more people, I'm going to hire a firm to automate some of the routine jobs for me - allowing me to bring on more clients and continue the cycle until I either am forced to hire - or sell off my domains and retire to the islands...
I guess I'm mostly worried about downtime. I wouldn't want to hire 10 people, anticipating a surge and it never happens.
Furthermore, I wouldn't want a huge surge and have to spend the time/money moving my site to a higher capacity dedicated server which will certainly cause some downtime.
I don't have my contact info on many sites I run, simply because the costs of having it there far outweigh the benifits. Many times people will use the contact info on an informational site as a quick, lazy way to find the info they want. While it may seem like a good idea to help them, it is costing you time and it probably pays off very little. Same with phones.
But the above is for info sites only. Ecomm sites, email and phone (if you can swing it) are nessesary evils.
With the email thing, unless you are running an ecomm site of some kind, I would seriously think about cutting out your contact info on the site or seriously making it very hard to find.
I don't have my contact info on many sites I run, simply because the costs of having it there far outweigh the benifits. Many times people will use the contact info on an informational site as a quick, lazy way to find the info they want. While it may seem like a good idea to help them, it is costing you time and it probably pays off very little. Same with phones.
Yes, I get a fair few students asking for what amounts to help with their essays, or people looking for career advice, as if I have nothing better to do.
The great thing about a web form is you can search the text for certain strings, and give specific replies automatically. For example, you might want to search for "link to us", or "list our website", etc, and put up an automatic response such as "sorry, we do not participate in link exchanges". I find this cuts out some of the noise.
I'm thinking the amount will increase with higher traffic.
