Yeah, I needed this like a hole in my head.
To make a long story short, what I had been promised would never happen in fact did happen, with a big thump. He used to say: Would I ever do that to you? I should have known better, dammit.
It started like any server outage, the kind I’ve had rather too many in the last couple of years. Always a good explanation from my hoster, service resumed within a few hours, no big issues.
But this time it was different in one very important aspect: my hoster pulled the plug on himself and what was left of his company and my server got taken offline permanently and without warning, on Saturday, January 15 at 2pm. Poof. Then nothing. Not a peep. Nada. Zip. Can’t get a hold of anybody. The datacenter won’t talk to me as I am not their client.
I had to see a Skype message simply stating he’s sick of it and he’s out of this biz, sorry and all that, didn’t mean to hurt anybody. Yeah.
My own clients, after a few hours and then days of waiting patiently, started getting worried. Some worried themselves sick. For good reason. Whatever was on that server, for all the fancy backups the hosting company used to make, was gone, backups and all. Lock, stock and barrel, all gone.
My heart skipped many beats since that fateful moment., until the reality set in: it’s all gone, forever. Time to try to pick up whatever pieces can be salvaged.
But this ship ain’t sinking yet, despite a few leaks. Luckily a year ago, worried over a possibility of exactly something like this happening, I had arranged for another server somewhere else, and got the new hoster to copy all the sites over. If need be, the nameservers could just be changed over and all’s good.
Unfortunately many sites have undergone drastic changes in this year, and the initial copies naturally were not kept up-to-date. Basically the content of any database-driven site, like Joomla or WordPress, unless their owners took regular complete backups, would be unrestaurable. Lost.
I don’t have tools, nor the storage capacity to backup everybody’s sites periodically. I advised everybody to take their own backups. Some did, most didn’t. Bad, rotten luck for them and for me. I lost this blog too, fortunately it wasn’t very big and I had the old Blogger version downloaded, just missing the last few posts. I rebuilt it post by post.
So it’s my turn to utter my deepest heartfelt apologies. Too late for a few good people. But there’s not a thing I can do, or I’d have already done it. Please believe me if you can stomach it. I am sorry, sorrier than anybody can imagine.
And let this be a lesson, for me and everybody. Never rely on anybody but yourself.
