During a chat session yesterday morning with my friend, Wei, I learned that the Burj Dubai Skyscraper would be officially opening to the public later in the day. I hadn’t been keeping up with the structure as much since it topped out, so this was news to me and I almost immediately shared it on my blog.

Little did I know that my blog, which I recently moved to self-hosted, was already being swamped with traffic related to the skyscraper. My previous entries about it had apparently been indexed quite well by search engines, so I had accumulated around 3,000 hits by lunch time. Considering that my site normally gets less than 500 hits per day, this was most unexpected.

Upon reaching 6,000 hits around mid-afternoon, my site went down and was replaced with a “This site has been suspended” message. I quickly contacted support and found out that the unexpected spike in traffic was wreaking havoc on my web host’s servers and they shut the site down in response. Not only that, but they had decided to close my account for good and refund my money. Bummer.

So, I spent all evening transferring my blog and images back to WordPress.com. Although I loved the freedom of self-hosting, I never dreamed that a sudden increase in traffic would result in my site being shut down – especially when I was far below the bandwidth usage that I had purchased. Since I never had that kind of problem on WordPress.com, it just seemed to make sense to come back.

Although my site was inaccessible most of the night because of domain changes, my blog has already been visited over 5,000 times this morning without a hiccup. Gotta love WordPress!