When a blog server crashes for good

Stephen Davies, a fellow junior PR blogger and host of the blog - PR Blogger, informed me today that his blog server has crashed and that he has lost his blog - entirely. You can see for yourself here.

What a bummer. Can you imagine? Just think of how it would feel, as a blogger, to have your site and every single post you have ever written erased for good. To me, it would be like having my favorite photo album burned.

Stephen wanted me to share these words with his readers:

To anyone who reads my blog, first of all - thank you, your viewing and participation is appreciated. Secondly you may have noticed since the weekend it has been unattainable. I received an email from my hosting provider that there will be a certain amount of downtime as they were moving to bigger servers and this would be necessary to start the moving process. “Great” I thought. If it’s going to make my hosting provider more efficient then I don’t mind a few hours downtime. After a trip down London for the weekend, upon my return I noticed my blog was still down. Although I did think it was strange to be down for this time, I presumed they were still working on the transfer.

Come Tuesday afternoon I started to become a little worried so I bounced an email over to support only to be told that during the exchange the databases got corrupt which in turn corrupted the back up files…which means, yes you guest it, I’ve lost my blog! Everything, the design, the plugins, the content, everything! It’s been around an hour since I found out, and my heads a little weary. No doubt I will start over again, but it’s been six months of working hard only for it to be all gone. As I’m still at university, one of the reasons I started to blog was, once graduated, I could show prospective employers it as a sort of online resume. Just to say “look what I’ve been doing while still studying”. I’ve still got eight months until graduation so I can get one up and running.

So WordPress users be aware. Try and chose a decent host and always back up your files. When you’ve put so much time and effort into something for a period of time, nly for it to disappear is pretty disheartening.

So that’s it. Just wanted to share my pain! Thanks to Blake who very kindly let me post this on his blog. But hey…it’s not the end of the world! ;)

--Stephen

Stephen, I know you put a lot of hard work into your blog and I’m sorry that this had to happen. I feel for you and wish that there were something that could be done. Hopefully your experience will have fellow bloggers pondering a situation like this happening to themselves – in which they can prepare for one by backing up their files. I can tell you for one it’s got me prepared. It’s good to see that you have such a great attitude about this and we all look forward to your new blog and your return into the blogosphere soon.

~In the meantime, you can contact Stephen at stephendavies1@gmail.com.


UPDATE: Whohoo, it appears that Stephen's site is up! Better hurry up and back up all those files Stephen :]