What Would You Think if You Went to Your Blog and it was Gone? October 5, 2008
Posted by Riley West in : The Making of an Internet Marketer , add a commentHello Folks:
I feel Ok now but I had some really intense inner conversations this morning.
You see, up until now I hadn’t bothered to keep backups of my posts. I didn’t see the need. After all I add one almost every day. They are rather common. To me, they seemed nice and secure in there in my Wordpress blog.
But, this morning as I sat at my big work table in a glassed in room that overlooks a nice piece of forest tranquility I went to boot up my blog and upload a file or two.
When I had the ftp browser up I saw a few files that seemed out of place. So I moved them into the folder they shared an address with.
Then I went out to breakfast with my wife and a friend and I went to visit my Mom in her assisted living place. It’s really very nice and Mom says she likes it and is making a bunch of new friends.
I decided to go back up the hill to my place and throw another post on the blog.
When I got to my computer I sat down and clicked to load my blog in admin. Nothing but some mysterious error messages! So I ran over to a website of mine and clicked that link back to my website, but uneditable. Same error messages.
Gone! I panicked. I ran through my files looking for backups and not finding them. I saw the mountain of work slip through a crack in the silicon I felt lost.
I started thinking about redoing all that work and thought about the momentum I was going to lose. I really didn’t like that!
So, I called my hosting company (Hostgator) and the first guy I talked to told me I probably wouldn’t lose all my data but that he couldn’t help me because it was an issue of corrupted code lines.
Then I notice they have 24/7 phone support. Usually I steer away from these because I have difficulty with accents and bad connections so I try to figure it out for myself.
But I was worried! So I called and got put on one of those automatic things that keep telling you where you are in line and that a representative will be with you soon.
When the rep answered he had a strong clear voice. I felt better. When I told him that I had moved a few files and now my blog was gone, he said, “Let me take a look.” After about one minute he came back on the line saying, “Your blog is up and running now… I just had to straighten up some files.”
I said “You fixed that almost immediately! You must really now your stuff.” He said he knew some things. I asked him how old he was. He said 17.
Blew me away. His name is Joseph Zennix and he only works Sundays. I’m sending in a glowing testimonial to feedback@hostgator.com.
That’s Hostgator. Bunch of neat folks. If you haven’t picked out a hosting company I recommend this one. I’ve had hosting companies who had such bad help that I just quit them and didn’t look back. (If you want to know who the companies are that I dropped due to bad service and difficult usage issues you can e mail me at rwestpnw@comcast.net) and I’ll tell you.
I don’t feel right bad mouthing these outfits in public. But I know who they are and you shouldn’t go there. I have several sites up at Yahoo but since I got into working with Hostgator I haven’t put a new one up at Yahoo, I just go there to maintain them.
Well, that’s all from me for now. I’m just relieved that my blog still stands and that all it took was a cool 17 year old kid at Hostgator to fix me right up.
I’ll see you on the road to success,
Riley West - An Oregon pioneer making his way in the trade.
PS: If you would like to build your own websites and sell things from them I think you should read this… rw
psps: And, if you are ready to know about all things IM related - see this!
