Website Troubles
21 April 2008
You may have noticed that the Kona Earth website has been having a lot
of problems this week. If you have had difficulties emailing us,
visiting our website or purchasing our coffee, please bear with us.
We're working on it and everything should be back to normal soon.
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There has been recent news coverage about Microsoft bidding to take
over Yahoo. The Internet is an important part of our modern world and
search engines are a vital part of the Internet so Microsoft's bid for
Yahoo may have important ramifications for the future of the Internet.
A few years ago I would have said that it's a good move for Microsoft,
now I'm not so sure.
Yahoo! has been the number two search engine for years with Google in
the number one slot and Microsoft a distant third. Being who they are,
Microsoft doesn't like being third but they just don't have the
technical savvy to catch up. I wasn't surprised when I heard that
Microsoft was bidding for Yahoo. This is certainly not the first time
Microsoft has tried to purchase or otherwise acquire technology they
could not develop themselves.
Yahoo has a lot of proprietary technology. I've used Yahoo Instant
Messenger and My Yahoo homepage for years now. Google has the best
search engine but I still use Yahoo for just about everything else.
When I decided to become a Kona coffee farmer and sell my coffee
online, using Yahoo's web hosting service (used to be Geocities) was a
quick, easy and inexpensive way to get started.
Yahoo's web servers were cutting edge ten years ago but, in
Internet-years, that was a very long time ago and Yahoo technology is
showing its age. I've had several minor issues with Yahoo's web hosting
service over the past couple years. Most of the issues I've managed
to figure out and fix myself which is good because getting any kind of
helpful response from Yahoo's customer support is difficult. Few
professional web developers would ever consider using Yahoo and I have
been tempted to switch on several occasions. There's only one reason
that Kona Earth has been hosted by Yahoo for this long: search
rankings.
Imagine that you woke up one morning and decided you just couldn't handle
another cup of bad coffee, what would you do? If you were drinking bad
coffee that probably means you've never heard of Kona Earth and our delicious
100% Kona coffee fresh from the
farm (yes, some people are deprived that way). You may have heard of Kona
Coffee but you would be saddened to learn that your local Starbuck's doesn't
offer any. To remedy the situation you might go online and ask your
favorite search engine for information on "Kona Coffee".
A search for "Kona coffee" returns lots and lots of websites. You
might click on one of the paid advertisements on the right but those
represent the highest bidder, not the most relevant website. There
are a lot of businesses bidding for the term "Kona coffee" and the
per-click price is currently much higher than the revenue generated.
It may be smart marketing for some large companies but it is not
reasonable for small farms like Kona Earth.
Of the the search results actually generated by the search engine, the
most obvious and probably first result is KonaCoffee.com. That
website is owned by a local businessman that is neither a farmer nor a
processor, he simply had the forethought to register the domain name
before anybody else did.
The next few search results are websites such as the Kona Coffee
Council, the Kona Coffee Festival, the Wikipedia entry on Kona coffee
and a few of the large processors. These websites are relevant and I
agree that they belong on page one. Unfortunately that leaves little
room for small farms like us.
The last time I checked, Kona Earth was on page four in the Google search
rankings. Very few people ever venture past page one and almost nobody
goes to page four. Page four is a higher ranking than most small Kona
coffee farms but still way too far down the list to be found by potential
customers.
Rankings vary from day to day and from one search engine to the next but the
concept is always the same and every website out there wants to be listed on
page one. It has taken a lot of time and effort to get Kona Earth's Google
ranking up to page four. I was very surprised when I unexpectedly discovered
that Kona Earth was listed on page one in the Yahoo results. Why was Kona
Earth listed so much higher than all the other Kona coffee websites? Why was
Kona Earth listed so high on Yahoo but not on Google or MSN? I can't say for
sure but the fact that Yahoo was our web host might have been a factor.
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[Note: If you own a website and you are now thinking of switching to a
Yahoo web hosting plan, keep reading. I have abandoned Yahoo not
because I wanted to but because their web hosting service is so poor
that I had no choice.]
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A friend of mine recently interviewed at Google. My friend, like myself,
has used a Yahoo email account for years. When interviewing at Google
they told him to check Yahoo's spam folder for his email from Google.
Not surprisingly there is some fierce competition between the two companies
and apparently Yahoo's servers like to mark Google email as spam.
It's possible that both of these cases are coincidence. Search engine
rankings and email spam filters are supposed to be impartial and
reliable. In theory, if the Yahoo search engine felt that Kona Earth
deserved a page one ranking then it should feel that way no matter who
hosted the website. In reality, I was very hesitant to switch to a
different web host because losing a page one ranking means losing a lot
of potential customers.
As bad as a low ranking is, a broken website is even worse. I fought
and I fought but finally I had to switch web hosts because the Yahoo
servers just weren't performing. When I called Yahoo, not only did
they not fix the problem, they refused to admit that there even was a
problem. With my website down I scrambled to find a new host.
Luckily, another friend of mine recommended a web host he had used in the
past (APlus.net)
and so far I am quite happy with them. As expected,
the switch was neither simple nor fast. In addition to all the normal
installation and configuration stuff I also had to make several changes to
the website's source code to get rid of the Yahoo specific stuff. It
took several days to get everything reconfigured for the new server.
It was particularly difficult to get the new web host to enable outbound
connections so credit card transactions would work, but that's a whole other
story. It's finally all working now and I'm trying to not think about
the sales and customers we lost while it was down.
Since the website is our primary source of sales, keeping it online is
vital. Needless to say, it has been a very long and frustrating
week for me. Last week was no piece of
cake and next week isn't looking fun either.
I'll probably discuss the details in next week's post but the short version
is that the tractor is broken even worse than the website. Luckily my
father is coming to visit soon and I've already warned him that he will be
getting his hands greasy while he's here.
There is a silver lining to this whole website mess. The biggest benefit
for our customers it that the website should be much more reliable and slightly
faster. We will also have full SSL support which should solve any
phishing issues. There are some
other new capabilities I'd like to implement but I don't know when I'll
have time and most of that is behind the scenes stuff anyways.
The thing I like best about the new website host is their spam filtering.
I receive several hundred junk emails every day. If you've
ever sent me an email and I didn't respond, sorry, it may have been
marked as spam and deleted by accident. Valid emails should get
through better now but don't even try to email me about taking Viagra
while refinancing your mortgage with cash made at home by investing in
hot stocks, diet pills or authentic watches.
It's too bad this website mess coincided with so many other problems but
I suppose it's better now than during our Christmas rush. Now that
we switched web hosts our Yahoo search rankings have dropped like a rock
but our Google rankings have actually moved up a bit. Having a
page one ranking was nice but it didn't generate as much business as I
would have thought. I think having a reliable website is more
important and moving to the new server should prove to be worth the
effort. Whatever the case, it's nice to know that I no longer have
to worry so much about the shenanigans of Yahoo and Microsoft.
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