Changing host to avoid the Panda Downhill

[sid786]

Any experience?

I'm starting to wonder if my host, which was DDoS'ed few months ago, might be the guy playing the villain.

Now this company ranks amongst the top 5 hosting provider in the VPS industry. I don't want to mention the name but these guys have top-notch support, and the charge is $50 a month.


I remember reading a post on Google forum where this guy changed the host and he saw an instant change in traffic. I'm wondering if anyone has noticed this?

My main site has lost over 70% of the traffic, and implementing my experience over the years has led to nothing but loss. Panda has really gamed me.

[1script]

I wouldn't go hosting-hopping just because of a DDoS attack. If that's in fact what was happening, they can easily follow you to the new provider. Try to find what it was and stop it at the firewall level. Maybe block an IP range or take another measure. And definitely have your hosting provider's techs involved. They're as much interested in protecting their network from DoS attacks as you are.

But in general, yes, I have to agree - Google has become über-sensitive to page load speeds. They say it's a small part of the algo but every time I have some issue with page load speed, I just know traffic troubles are to follow. Every time you're getting close to 1000ms in Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) in WMT, you're playing with fire.

[sid786]

You are right -- the hosting provider's are much more concerned in resolving the issue. They were kind enough to act first, and fix the DDos attack within hours.

However, right after that day, my main site's traffic was cut down by 50%. I wonder if it was Panda to blame, or Google Bots just thought this site is probably bad -- I know Google Bots are regularly indexing sites to see if they are hack-free, but I feel that wasn't the case here.

And yes, Google says load speed is a small part of the algorithm, and I think because of "Gzipping" the pages, they load fairly quick.