A few weeks ago I spoke about the service Safe Swaps in my article Building Your Email List with Solo Ads. Safe Swaps is paid service that allows marketers to buy, sell and swap advertisements for their email lists.
In total I had paid for 4 solo ads to go out within the first 10 days of January. 3 solo ads went out earlier this week. The 4th was supposed to go out yesterday (9th Jan). Alas, the advertisement could not be delivered as the Safe Swaps website went down last night and has been down all day.
The message last night stated that the hosting account had been suspended. This happens whenever a customer doesn’t pay their hosting bill but I didn’t think this would have been the reason as hosts always advise the customer first and there is no way any business with paying members is going to let their website go down because of not paying their bills.
I didn’t receive any email from the owners as to what the problem was but they did manage to email some other members. A member on Warrior Forum posted the email they were sent:
Sorry people, but we have a problem with our hosting provider – HostGator. They have tried to resolve their own issues by throwing all their problems at me.
After several hours on the phone, they weren’t able to say anything good.
In my opinion HostGator is a piece of shit. I recommend to all who are using HostGator, to change to something more serious, like RackSpace, for example.
My techs have already switched everything to a backup server, but propagation of these changes takes some time.
Please stay tuned, everything will be back online shortly.
This page will automatically disappear once DNS propagation has completed.
In the Warrior Forum thread there are people supporting what Safe Swaps are doing and others who are using this as an excuse to put the boot into them.
At this point in time, what caused their service to be shut down is speculative however it does appear that their service was reported for spamming and Hostgator have responded by shutting them down. Hopefully the site will be back up soon as the solo ad I purchased was not delivered because of the problem.
I’m still keen on doing a complete of the service for you guys as list building is a topic I’m very interested in at the moment. So far I can see a lot of pros and cons to using the service however I have found the members there to be very friendly (which is something that always benefits a community).
I’ll update this post when it’s clear what caused them to be shut down.
UPDATE: Safe Swaps appears to be back online now :)
Kevin