Perhaps unsurprisingly, given posting frequency, my blog stats have dropped off a cliff recently.

However, I’ve been blogging for quite sometime now and I’ve been through blips in output before and they’ve never been this severe: i.e. where the stats have essentially dropped back to the level they were at when I first started this experiment. It’s also sudden: like someone flicked a switch.

At present I have two theories:

1. For some reason I have fallen out of, or been dropped down, Google’s index.

Or…

2. WordPress.com have either had problems with their servers (leading to 1.) or their stats engine has encountered some problems.

My secondary stats engine (sitemeter) does show a fall, albeit a less severe one, and so presently I am leaning towards number one although the support forum for wordpress does suggest that several other people are having problems. Ditto Google Webmaster tools – I can’t see anything obvious other than them taking away my ability to request a given crawl rate (annoying).

Is anyone else seeing a problem? Have you had any issues getting to the site?

Of course there is a silver lining, if I am unable to resolve the issue then I may well use this as a prompt to go self-hosted because my historical traffic was a big part of why I haven’t done so already. Being self-hosted gives quite a large range of options, the possibility of proper analytics when trying to sort out stuff like this and the option of generating some income.

It’s a thought anyway.