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The short explanation is that my incredibly incompetent host 24hostingnow culminated many years of highly unsatisfactory service by descending into a massive downtime lasting several days, after which they were of course unable to restore my site to anything other than an error-filled shitfest. Since their backups were ridiculously outdated, the site eventually had to be restored from my relatively less outdated backup – which still means I’ve lost almost every post since the redesign.
I am obviously rather bummed by this, but in the context of eight years of blog content, 1.5 months is not a tragedy. It’s my own fault for not backing up more regularly, given that I already knew my hosts were nimrods. I guess I’d never got into the habit before because with Movable Type my content always survived server problems. Yet another way WordPress makes my life way more troublesome than Movable Type ever did, but what’s done is done.
I’m not sure whether to try and recreate the lost posts or just move on. There’s a lot of background work I will definitely have to do (because I’d done a lot of category resorting and tagging which was probably lost as well), but hopefully that shouldn’t affect the surface functioning of the site. But anyway, I’m just glad I could finally tell you guys I’m not dead, just technically incapacitated. In the meantime, anyone got a good, affordable web host to recommend?
Update: Praise the Lord, Krishna, Guan Yin, Xenu and above all, GOOGLE! Have recovered a fair amount of stuff from Google’s cache, and will reinstate it soon. Yay!
I use hostmonster (http://www.hostmonster.com/), they are rated very highly and I haven’t had any problems with them. Not sure what you’re paying now, but they’re having a USD5.95/month promo.
I use Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com/) and haven’t had any real problems with it (it’s been down for ten minutes a couple of times). Easy one-click wordpress install and upgrades. 6.95USD/month.
If you want to dish out a little more money, Laughing Squid is supposed to be really great. (http://laughingsquid.net/)
Also, there are some pretty good wordpress backup plugins you might want to look into. I have one set up to automatically email me a backup every month because there’s no way I would remember to backup my posts regularly.
I was just about to suggest Google cache. Glad you had some success with it.
It’s great to have the site back. Hopefully inspirational. :)
Thanks Ci’en and Becky for the recommendations, I’ll definitely check them out. They are both more expensive than what I currently pay, but obviously, getting what I pay for over here has not worked out particularly well!
Becky: I actually had one of those backup plugins installed and thought I’d set it to do scheduled backups, but I must have been wrong.
James: I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier. I could have saved myself and Alec a lot of moody grumbling.
Alec: I’ll believe that bit about “inspiration” when I see it. I’m a little dough-bious.
Hi Michelle,
I don’t have any webhosts to recommend, since I’m also trying to extricate myself from a problematic webhost which doesn’t seem to respond to my enquiries (I liken the situation to pulling out of the Iraq War). My website’s gone btw, because I failed to renew the domain, so if you go to my web address, you’ll find it completely in German.
I have a temporary site here : http://www.mayeewong.tumblr.com but I’ll be moving over to my friend’s Stee’s webspace, once I find a suitable domain name.
Michelle couldn’t you set up a free WordPress hosted blog like Alec did and just have the url direct there? You don’t have quite as much control as you would with your own space but hey, it’s free.
Why don’t you guys set up a shared webhost together on dreamhost?
Or like a bunch of you guys pool, because the amount of space is quite frankly, ridiculous.
no complaints over 2 years – some downtime, but at $10 a month for a one click installs, my own sql set up, shared server and unlimited domain hosting, and oh, about 600GB, I am frankly, not complaining.
The machine they give is decent – centOS, 2 GB of RAM, on a pentium server.
Mayee: Yes, I discovered the unexpected German encampment at your site recently. I guess the stuff you write about is usually so sophisticated and intellectual they decided it was Czechoslovakia. Keep me updated of where you eventually settle so I can update the sidebar. :)
James: The difference in control between self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com is unacceptably vast for me, and with eight years of content, I need as much flexibility in my blog system as I can get.
Karen: Because what you describe has way more bells and whistles than one syntaxfree and one kneadyguy can realistically use. :)