If you’ve visited this site in the past few months, you may have noticed that it looked a bit odd and that there hasn’t been much happening. To begin with, there were random chunks of bold and italic text all over the place, images that looked like they’d been chucked together by Picasso on a particularly bad hair day, and so on.
The reason for these ‘aberrations’ was one and the same. I couldn’t add to the site or change those elements that had been altered by the ghost in the machine because the MySQL database had become corrupted.
Even worse – and I’ve no excuse at all for this Olympian demonstration of abject stupidity – I’d relied on my webhosting company to do what they claim to do on their site.
I wasn’t backing up the database as often as I should have been because they (being the professionals) were doing a complete backup every week. Of course, they weren’t doing any such thing. Thus, when the database when west, so did my site and my ability to do anything with it (other than start all over again)…
I’m not completely blaming the hosting company for this as I should know – after all these years – to take backups myself without relying on their ‘remote’ site management.
However, this was just one example of how amateur this particular hosting company proved to be.
As another, there was no way they were anywhere near the claimed ‘99% uptime’ but getting them to pay for this in the way their site claimed was like getting blood out of a stone.
So, I shifted the hosting and I split it between two companies, HostGator and Host The Name. I chose the first because of their size and reputation, the second because I know the people running it and I trust them. The prices are good and so far, I’ve been very pleased with the service and uptime of both organizations!
But the whole episode got me thinking about the lessons to be learned.
There are three things that you can and should learn from my misfortune stupidity, every one of which is a lesson for anyone who has websites or blogs that they rely on for a living or as an income-generating sideline.
In no specific order, these are:
Cheap webhosting will let you down sooner or later. Ignore the social ‘proof’ provided by the mass of satisfied customer testimonials on their site – they will let you down for certain.
It doesn’t matter how professional your host appears to be or how reliable they have been so far. You cannot afford to rely on them to do what they claim to do because who knows what might change, or when?
Finally and most crucially, make backing up your site or blog a central element of your regular routine, something that you do at least once a month with a site that you post to irregularly or every week if you are an active content poster.
For WordPress users, this is drop-dead simple because plugins like Backup WordPress and WordPress Database Backup essentially do the job for you. Alternatively, you can back up everything using the ‘Wizard’ on the cpanel of your site…..
One way or the other, regular backups are an absolutely essential element of running any commercially-focused resource on the net. If you are not backing up your ‘stuff’ on a regular basis, please start doing so today…
Or you might end up like me, restarting from scratch, rescuing old posts, reinstalling your site and your plugins and generally spending lots of time messing about in the totally pointless pursuit of just getting back to where I was before…
And that’s a pretty dumb waste of time, right?
Or – to put it another way – a wise man learns from his mistakes. A wiser man learns from the mistakes of others…
