Blogie Blog

I apologize for the many days when my blogs were down. This and most of my other blogs were taken offline due to a hardware foul-up at my previous host’s supposedly ‘industry strength’ data center. What a dismaying, depressing week it was for me.

The main reason why I chose Hostican.com for my VPS account was their “excellent” customer-service support. Boy, was I sorely mistaken. Only after 2 days did they inform me that the hard drive my VPS was residing in had failed, and only after much frantic emailing by yours truly. Funny how, in their mass-mailed message, they kept emphasizing that the disk drive they were using was of an expensive variety. Now wouldn’t you take better care of an expensive piece of equipment?

And there were no backups at all! After another volley of emails from me, Hostican finally replied that they couldn’t recover any usable data whatsoever from the errant hard disk. But… aren’t backups supposed to be kept in separate drives? Nada. Zilch. Nai. Wala.

Mind you, I’m not blaming Hostican for my misery — I myself should’ve kept more updated backups of my blogs in my local computer. I’m simply warning you, my dear readers, to be more careful in your choice of hosting services. Stay away from those who promise but don’t deliver. How to know? Well, that’s why I’m blogging about it.

I’ve now transferred to Liquid Web. So far so good. The customer service is verifiably excellent, and I can attest to that. But let’s see how my blogs fare hereabouts…

Thank you, thank you, thank you to my good friend, Bob Martin, for showing me how to recover my blogs’ comments. Before Bob told me about this remarkable WordPress plugin called — aptly enough — Comment Recovery, I feared I’d lost all your reactions to comment heaven. So, in case you run into similar problems with your own blogs, have this plugin on hand. Word of advice, though: don’t delete the comment notification messages sent to you by WordPress — the plugin recovers and reinserts comments by way of those emails.

Since my latest local backups were months old, I had to rely on Web-based automatic archives. I’d thought that Wayback Machine might help, but no go there. I was able to retrieve most of my posts (not all… ) from Google’s awe-inspiring cache. And I have another plugin to be thankful for: Google Sitemap Generator. This nifty plugin ensures that Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com index your blog pages. Tip: this will work best if you enable SEO-friendly URLs.

Before I close, here’s my most crucial advice: ALWAYS back-up your WordPress database — try this plugin: DBManager; and, ALWAYS back-up your wp-content directory to your local computer.

Whew! What an ordeal it was! I hope none of you ever go through what I did.

Happy blogging!

Tagged: hosting services, VPS

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