Scared Out of My Skin

Well, we don’t know what happened– It seems to be my lot in life to thoroughly befuddle tech support with all my strange and baffling technical problems– but I lost four of my Bluehost blogs today. The ordeal is over and the posts have been restored, but WOW I think I just earned another handful of gray hairs again. I’m getting too old for this, just too old.

The Bluehost technician could not understand why all my posts were suddenly “File Not Found.” My blogs’ homepages were up, though. But if you tried to access an individual post or page, it was not there. He patiently spent an hour, sifting through individual files on my server, checking an older backup version of my blogs with the today’s problem files. Couldn’t detect any problems. But my posts were gone! At the technician’s urging, he suggested that I replace the current files with Bluehost’s stored backup of my files. But Bluehost’s files were several days old, and I’d written quite a number of posts across all those blogs in half a week. I didn’t want to go that far back in time– I’d have to rewrite all those posts I had done!

But guess what?

I had done a Full Directory Backup on all my blogs just 45 MINUTES PREVIOUSLY. We decided to use that backup, and as soon as the technician uploaded the files- voila! I was back in business! I almost fainted from relief. I think it nothing short of a miracle that I had created a backup of my directory within a sliver of time before the files failed.

We still don’t know what happened. The technician hypothesized that perhaps a plugin, or something I had done in my cPanel had overwritten something, or something like that. We couldn’t tell exactly what happened, just that some information was missing.

I am just so glad I’m back. And the ordeal is over. Now I’m going to lay down for a while and let my blood pressure go back down to normal, lol.

Oh– for those of you who have been following my tribulations with the “CPU Quota Exceeded” errors that I have been plagued with… I got a new Wordpress theme for this blog, and I have had NO errors since. I strongly suspect my problems were due to the complexity of the last theme I had. Unfortunately, my New York Renovator saw a huge jump in traffic last week, and was sputtering a little. I may have to change the theme for that, as well. I love that theme, so it will be a difficult change. But I am finding evidence for my suspicion that if you use Bluehost, you really need a sleek, clean theme. I recommend them if you have a “small” blog– a personal blog with low to moderate traffic. Their tech help is incredible. However, if you get a lot of traffic, it’s best to go with a company that can handle larger strains on the server. f you decide to go with Bluehost, would you consider using my affiliate link HERE? I get credit for referring others to Bluehost.

UPDATE: The issue recurred again! Arg! Once again, my home page could be seen, but the posts, pages, comments, images could not be seen. The second tech support person could not help me out, she kept saying it was my permalink structure (which I knew it was not). I strongly suspect it had something to do with my htaccess file being rewritten after I enabled hotlinking protection on my blogs. It looks like hotlinking issues are common, and others have had this issue before me. I went into my cPanel, disabled the hotlinking protection, and in a few minutes, I was back in business. So that was it.

As a sidenote, it is cool to think that I knew more than the tech support with this issue. Ha!