Free Cloud Services and CDN are Risk Factors for your WordPress Blog

This post might help the innocent WordPress users by avoiding at risk factors by using some free Cloud Services and CDN services with or without caps which are offered nowadays by various WordPress plugins.

Why you are definite that some Free Cloud Services and CDN services are bad?

We will not mention any any brand name of two free Cloud Services and associated CDN service which dangerously killing this blog.

We noticed that after using these two free Cloud Services, our blog was losing traffic. It is quite unusual to such a huge traffic loss within a few days.

So, we eliminated the first probability without any second thought.

Second diagnostic approach was from webmaster tools. We noticed that Google Crawler has increased the crawl by 30% (approximately), it is the highest we ever seen for this blog. It implied, Google Crawler wanted to “see” what is happening inside.

We checked our SERP : no, it was as usual, no change. One of these two free Cloud Service needed to change our name servers to custom.

We discovered from Google’s one service, we are selectively losing traffic from only two countries and the traffic is from Google Search Engine with high Keyword Value.

Our team decided to switch off all caching and stop using both paid and these two free Free Cloud Services, there by ensuring content is only on our server.

For historical importance, these two Free Cloud Services are not from Google, we are using several Free Cloud Services from Google and obviously they have no problem.

What happened after we switched off these two Free Cloud Services ?

Unless you have not faced this situation, you will not believe : just changing the name server to own, thereby ensuring we are not using these Free Cloud Services, then traffic was immediate boost of number of visitors online. It was more than 7 times, the value was less than the highest we have during the peak hours without these Free Cloud Services, but definitely it was clear, these Free Cloud Services are actually stealing our traffic.

Advices regarding using Free Cloud Services

• Do not use any Free Cloud Services for your WordPress Installation, as you are giving the permission to Read and Write, they will misuse the data particularly from high quality blogs.
• Some Free Cloud Services asks to add Google Analytics code or even user id password, do not give to these Free Cloud Services.
• Do not use any Free Cloud Services who claims to increase protection. You and your main server provider will protect the security, giving the keys to Free Cloud Services will increase your risk.
• If you have doubt or need suggestion regarding these Free Cloud Services, whether you will give your Google related (analytics for example) user id password, ask in Google Webmaster’s forum.
• Use trusted CDN instead of Free Cloud Services, when you will be able to pay.

We wanted to test these two Free Cloud Services, actually these Free Cloud Services performed well when tested on Web Page Test, but Google was notifying the page speed is increasing.

We used these Free Cloud Services to test, we have the infrastructure to control the damage; but most usual bloggers might face “what to do situation” after deploying these Free Cloud Services. So, it is a precaution about Free Cloud Services for your WordPress blog. Here is another article on Risks of Free Cloud Services, basically public cloud computing.