Are YOUR Passive Income Sites Too Passive… Like This One?

OK I feel so stupid.

My online income was pretty poor in December 2018. In fact it set a new low since I started regularly making a whole load of money online back in 2002.

I thought that I might just have had a poor month because of seasonal factors. My main niche isn’t shopping related. It’s fair to say that in December most people in Western countries (my core audience) are focussed on shopping and, er, shopping.

But no – I realised there was maybe another reason for the income drop…

One of my top 3 income generating websites was no longer online!

Much to my horror, I checked my website statistics and sure enough, the site had apparently been offline for a while:

Ah, I feel so stupid!!!

Anyway, I think what happened is that sometime in November 2018 my hosting company moved my website to a new server. Nothing bad about that – my sites’ performance seems a lot better since they made the migration.

But the new server has a new IP address. That seems to have affected the CloudFlare service I was using to control access to the site. Normally I wouldn’t bother with a service like CloudFlare. But my site was continually hit by spammers so I thought that putting the site under CloudFlare protection might lessen the impact that the spammers were having on the site.

The net result was practically no visitors to my site for around 8 weeks.

Ouch!

So please learn from my mistakes here and make sure you periodically check your website from time to time. Especially if you’re reliant on the passive income from it.

Or if you don’t check your site from time to time then maybe you could use a pinger service that will let you know if your site goes down. These are often free to use, and could really help you out when your attentions are turned elsewhere…

I guess another lesson from this is that I have too many darned websites. I’ve begun to expire the domain names of the ones that don’t make me any money or that I’ve stopped caring about. But even so it will take me a while to rationalise my huge online empire.

Have you ever found your website has gone down for days or even weeks on end? Did you lose some passive income as a result? Do you have way to many tiny microniche sites that you don’t really care about anymore? Do share your horror stories by leaving a comment below!

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