The complexity added by all the services for deploy, bug tracing, and dear god, security auditing, made for a living hellscape that crippled our ability to ship software for some time. Not to mention the bifurcation of resources to keep the monolith happening for customers using it while the microservice mess is being created.
There is almost a zealot-like-brainwashing that has happened to folks. I made case after case to our engineering team "This doesn't solve our business use cases. We're prematurely scaling. We're unable to move code into production efficiently. This is very hard to understand for outsiders joining our team." --- All fell on deaf ears since I "didn't get it." When I put a hard stop on adding any more microservices without a use scale for why we need that scale, I was called "toxic."
In the end we fired the whole team since they wouldn't buy into destroying their microservice dream world for something practical and put everything back in the monolith except for one service.
Our amazon bill is 1/8th what it was. Security auditing/upkeep is 1/100th what it once was. Deploys are done without fanfare more than 1x/week. Our average response time is down from 500ms to less than 100ms since we aren't hop-scotching services all over God's green earth.
Note: This isn't a tiny project. 200k users, 700-1000 requests/minute during peak times, lots of data moving through this.
Cheers Scott, I consult in this space also, though recently I've been trying to productize my way out of it. I built http://killswit.ch to help folks like us who are one person agencies and have to deal with sending traffic to sites they don't control. It sucks when your KPI's suffer because of someone else. Let me know if you want to give it a whirl.
Growth hacking is largely gimmick driven. It's about quick wins. Here's an article I wrote about why gimmicks have to work with the product: http://joshuaziering.com/on-marketing-gimmicks/
The adrank could be affected by things like this but here's what I would ask you to consider: Google is very sly about measuring on page performance metrics. If you have downtime, how many visitors do you think are going to return to the Search Engine Results Page? Google knows this and could use it as a an indicator of a poor performing ad. My service is different from manual pausing for this reason. Here's a good article on the type of work they're doing to create adrank: http://vuurr.com/impact-of-google-adwords-quality-score-on-c...
Specifically, I've not had a "penalty" for pausing ads myself but the ads were typically performing well. I pause the bad ones pretty quickly.
When I was doing agency work the thing that disappointed me the most was that we had LARGE clients with BIG budgets who would have SERIOUS downtime for no particular reason. It was so frustrating. This service comes from that frustration.
I'd also be happy to entertain any questions you might have about the solo-founder undertaking and how I arrived at this particular niche of monitoring.
This is a prime example of a concept called "marketing debt." Your link building efforts didn't match the risk profile for your business and you got burned. For a better explanation, http://joshuaziering.com/why-marketing-debt-is-expensive/
This question really depends on your risk profile. If you were younger I'd suggest speculating with the 1k and 2k, and investing the 5k in your retirement so you can benefit from many years of compound interest. What're the constraints you're working under?