How I convinced my webhost to unblock Googlebot

In my last post I mentioned the difficulties I was having with my hosting provider and their inability to understand that they had blocked Googlebot from crawling my site. I of course tried the live chat route, then I did the ticket submit route followed by more live chat, another ticket and so on. This continued for 5 days before I finally managed to reach someone who actually felt like checking into it rather than giving me the “everything seems fine from our end” response that the other dozen or so people had given me. In this last email, the level 3 administrator stated that he had found google IP’s that were accidentally blocked and that he had removed them from the firewall blacklist, literally 20 minutes later I had hits on my traffic log from Googlebot, so I replied with a few[…]

Why I don’t like shared hosting.

It’s been a few days since I last posted, so I figured I would make a quick post about why I haven’t posted in a few days.

I have been trying to track down a few problems that are preventing this site and others I have on the same server from being crawled by Googlebot. About a week ago my daily crawl averages dropped straight down to zero on about 6 sites that I have on the same server, which just happens to be a shared hosting account. I also have a bunch of other sites that are on a different host, and some that are on dedicated servers that are being crawled just fine, so this led me to check if perhaps my hosting provider was blocking Googlebot. By all indications, this is indeed what is happening but[…]