Thursday, September 11, 2008

ePN Blocks Hostgator Check Your Webmaster Tools

What a day today was in the Internet Marketing world. If you use Hostgator as your host you may have had your servers blocked by ePN/eBay. Well know one knew for sure but 100s if not 1000's of website were not pulling the API from eBay. A API if you don't know is how products or RSS feeds propagate to websites. Now at 8 PM the sites I had down are all back, but showing warnings in Google Webmaster tools.
WARNING "Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time. Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page."
Resubmitting them seams to have taken care of the warnings. This started with me at 7AM EST when I couldn't get into the ePN Dashboard. I even twittered about it TWITTER. Then finally after finding a way into the ePN forum I found others having issues getting into there dashboards. I shut down for a couple hours and came back and BAM I was in the ePN Dashboard. Then during a search I found that all my sites on my Hostgator Baby Croc account weren't pulling in the API feed from ebay. After reading some more I decided to send a ticket to HG and they responded as follows.
"Hello,This is happening because Ebay has temporarily blocked our server from connecting to their api:" The statement speaks for itself or so it seams. It turns out eBay making big changes this week and something on there servers was changed and some DNS needed time to propagate across the Web.
No sweat though my Hostgator reseller accounts where all fine all day. No issues at all. Problems like this can be avoided sometimes by having a reseller account. When you use a shared server your site are on the same server as 1000's of others. If there is someone doing bad things on that server you get bumped with everyone else on that server. I'm not saying ePN banned any server in fact they stated on the forum that they were not blocking users and that it was a routing issue.
This is a typical day for web masters and Internet Marketers. Some days its like walking on glass. As long as the sitemaps go through I think all is well for now. These are issues that happen all the time but can be avoided in some instances by Using a Reseller Account