Hip2Save.com Launches New Website after Unscheduled Outage

Bloggers who rely on free-hosted blogging software often learn that you may actually pay a price for things in life that are "free". This life lesson was recently made very clear for the publishers of the coupon and money saving website Hip2Save.com. Collin Morgan, publisher of Hip2Save.com, said she was hosting a giveaway to benefit Toys for Tots on the website when the blog was locked by Google’s automated tools. At the time, the website was hosted on the free Google Blogger platform. On the Friday before Christmas, readers were greeted by the message, “the blog you were looking for was not found”, said Morgan.

“It was very stressful and I did not know what to do,” said Morgan. “Readers were emailing me personally and there was nothing I could tell them.” During the previous 24 hours, over 7,000 people had entered Morgan’s contest where 20 winners received a $50 gift card to spend on toys at Amazon.com to benefit Toys for Tots. Readers flooded Blogger’s support forums asking where the site had gone and when it was coming back. These support forums are not monitored by Google employees and all responses come from other forum readers. Attempts to use Google’s automated tools to reactivate the website were also unsuccessful.

Hip2Save.com set up a temporary blog to inform readers about the status of the blog and to announce the names of the contest winners. During the next three days, over 75,000 people followed links from Twitter and other blogs to this temporary website. After five days of being offline with no official response from Google, the site went forward with the original plan to launch a stand-alone website on their own servers.

After launching a slimmed down version of the blog, word spread through forums announcing the new site. “The initial traffic was huge and reader comments showed tremendous enthusiasm about the site being up and running again” said Morgan. “I can’t thank the readers enough for the support during the outage and for sticking with me."

During 2009, Hip2Save.com built a following by offering money-saving deals and coupon offerings to major retailers such as Target, Amazon, Walmart, and Walgreens. Hip2Save.com began 2009 with less than 40,000 visitors per month and ended the year with over 1.5 million visitors per month.

About Hip2Save.com

Hip2Save.com attracts over 1.5 million visitors per month and features information about saving money, available coupons, and living a frugal lifestyle. The site features an active community with 30% of visitors to the website coming more than 200 times per month. The publisher, Collin Morgan, lives in Camp LeJeune, N.C.