I <3 My Host

So I’m an idiot.

I wrote my post for Monday, and scheduled it to post around lunchtime, as I always do. After work, I got home and saw that while people were reading the post, there weren’t any comments, which made me wonder if there was a reason besides it was a crap post (I mean…I didn’t think it was…but normally with my cake related ones, I see a few comments at least.)

Someone mentioned that they’d tried to comment a few times, but it kept coming back with “Forbidden”, so I thought I’d try reinstalling WordPress. Normally when I’ve done this, its worked fine afterwards – its not over writing everything, just the core files. Just before I did that, I updated a plugin that was fine previously.

Update…timed out. Well, thats fine, its done that before and when I’ve refreshed, it’s all working fine. Refresh…blank page.

It’s at this point that you start to get a bit worried. What do I do? What did I do? I know, I’ll log in to the ftp thingy and try updating WordPress that way. Except I was trying to do it with a web based ftp thing and it timed out halfway through.

Remember in that bloody awful episode (they are all bloody awful…) of Sex and the City when Carries laptop goes bang? I saw that 10 years ago and after my first laptop had a panic attack, I swore I would keep the most important stuff backed up. You would think I would learn my lesson but no, so many times, I have had a computer or something explode and then weep that I hadn’t backed something up to the latest version.

Of course I didn’t have a back up of the website. So I sent my hosts, 34SP.com a ticket to restore the website from the last backup. They did it, but things still didn’t work, so they restored the database from last weeks backup too. Success! I have a site back! I’d only lost two posts, but I still had the photos in my trash on the desktop, and the posts were still in my Google Reader – so simple, just a case of copying the text over and uploading the images!

It made me realise again that self hosting really is a good thing to do though – I know that these blogs are just our little hobbies (or at least start off that way!) but when you can’t get to it anymore, there is such a panic! For £4 a month, I know my little space is safe. (And really, whats £4? A day ticket to get around Bristol? I know which one makes me happier!)

So thank you, 34SP.com, for saving my little blog when I am an idiot, and for helping with my stupid questions. You are awesome!

(Oh, and if you’re thinking of self hosting your own blog, you can get a months hosting for free by mentioning my domain name when you register :) )