Major Website Downtime: What I've Learned from It

Last weekend was pretty much a miserable moment for me. Normally what I go out some where every weekend but for some budget reserving reason, I decided to become a geek at home and work on a few of my online projects I was neglecting. On Saturday, I noticed that I can't access my FTP and Cpanel. Suspecting something was going on so I went to my web hosting support page to find out. It was then I found out that the data center for my web hosting recently found some errors on the hard drive and they decided to check and upgrade the entire thing. They then found out that the some parts of the disk were corrupted and they had to scan and repair the hard disk. Unfortunately because of their clumsiness, the back up was also stuffed inside the same disk and in the end they couldn't restored the corrupted disk thus installed a new fresh hard drive. All of my years of web work went down the drain. It had crossed my mind to make a back up of the entire thing on my web hosting server but I kept on procrastinating it. So, the most important thing I learned is to always make BACKUPS! and DON'T BUY CHEAP STUFF.

My web hosting tracker reported that my web host was down more than a day:



Recently, I was trying to find a reason to change to another web host. I guess, I have found my answer but there is another reason why I don't think that web host matches my requirement. Oh well, I guess I need to do more web host hunting.

Lucky for me, I still have some of my old data in my laptop. By combining the practical use of Google cache and Google Picasa, I managed to restore my most recent blog posts and some other data that were lost. It required some hard work of re-coding back all my blog post to point all the images to Google Picasa but at least I don't have to worry about my image bandwitdh anymore.

I've also acquired some new tricks and triggered some new ideas because of this occasion. As people say, something must happen for a reason. I guess one can learn greatly from a defeat rather from a winning!

My current web host had learned their lesson. Hundreds of their paid customers will definitely find a new place including me. Now all I need right now is to wait for my domain name to expire and I'll subscribe to my new web host (haven't decided yet). If only my requirements were not so many..