This week I had the “charming” experience of discovering that my flagship site — yes, THIS one! — had disappeared from cyberspace. I was lucky, for two reasons:
- I have a top-notch webmaster, who really knows her stuff. She was already on it before I contacted her
That’s one of the things I love about her. - I had a hunch why it happened. And it turns out, I was almost right.
My hosting company had migrated the servers, to make them more stable and secure. In general, this is a good thing. Servers can deteriorate over time; data can get corrupted; and gremlins start to pop up. So I was glad to hear we were being moved. It’s a routine thing, but stuff can go wrong. If there’s a power surge during the transfer, an electrical storm, if Mercury is retrograde. . . you get the idea. Stuff happens.
It’s happened to me a few times before (with different sites, different hosts), with the end result that my site was back up and running better than before. I know that we have regular backup, so not too much data will be lost. I just hate like heck not to have a web presence with my main site, for even a few minutes — let alone hours.
I know if you have a web site or blog, you can relate. What would you do, if it just disappeared — and you didn’t know when it would be back?
Yeah, for most people that’s freak-out time!
photo by mgstudio3d
Still, when it happens to YOU, it’s hard not to panic. I gave myself 24 hours before I started to worry.
Well, it worked out OK. I got my site back within 24 hours. And I had a lovely excuse why I couldn’t post to the blog, hehehe. Now I have to keep writing and get caught up with my blog challenge; I am a little behind schedule and that has nothing particularly to do with my site disappearing.
Let me know how you handle it when things go wrong with your technology; I’m always looking for better ideas on how to deal with issues that show up in my business.
Oh. If you’d like a referral to one of the best webmasters in the business, contact me. I’ll see if she’s got room in her schedule for any new clients.
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Yikes! I’ve had this happen once and like you, I simply called my webmaster. It ended up that a quick call to the hosting company and we were back in business! I like to think freaking out is not an option but that day I was pretty upset! LOL
Hi Martha,
Thanks for your feedback. It’s really great to have a hosting company that’s responsive. That was one reason we moved hosts with one of our sites a while back — they had no staff for their “customer service” line!