In the beginning of this month, the web host, where I had my blog, deleted my account and all the files associated with it. And this is my story of having a blog, then losing it and finally restoring it along with the lessons learned in the process. I hope this also serves as a lesson to others as well so they avoid my mistakes.
Let’s start from the beginning. Back in 2009-10, I was thinking of starting a blog/website of my own, with my own top level domain. Back then, I didn’t even had a bank account. I had to deposit the amount in cash in the domain name seller’s account to get the domain. After the hectic experience of standing in queues, confirming about the deposit with the seller over phone, I was in no mood to spend any more for this and was looking for the best way to host my blog (for free).
The easy choice was blogger but, it had a lot of limitations for what I had in mind for my site. So after a bit googling, I settled on wordpress, downloaded and installed in my local system and was confident that I can do it in a web server too. Now I started looking for free web servers to host my blog without imposing much restrictions and after a lot of trial and error settled with x10hosting. The conditions were: I have to login once a month and can have only 3 domains, 3 sub-domains and 3 mysql databases at max in free account. This was not a problem…….at first.
To be honest (with myself), I’m not a frequent blogger though I certainly didn’t intended to be like that. Initially the enthusiasm of setting up and tweaking wordpress kept me busy with it. But gradually I lost interest in it and it was evident from the gaps of months and even years between my posts. So, I tend to forget about the blog. However, the once in a month login requirement reminds me of it. This was just a little annoyance I could tolerate for all the facilities I was getting. There were some hiccups as well, like database server unavailable or the server is not responding. But all the resources were free, you can’t really demand service quality without paying for it.
Everything was going just fine when I forgot to login for a month and my host brutally deleted my account with all my files. I don’t blame them. They had sent me a reminder and a grace period of 21 days before deleting my account. But, the mail got lost in the heaps of junk mail I receive everyday. I just noticed it on 23rd day, after I found out that my site is offline.
So after four blogs (2 failed, 2 survived) and seven years later, I’m back to square one. Well, not exactly. I had database backups of both the blogs from a few months back and since there were no new posts after that, I at least had the contents of my earlier posts. But, everything else; the images, the files, static web pages and few of my custom developed codes were lost, forever.
So now, with the database backups with me, I tried to create another user with x10hosting but found out they have stopped accepting signups from my country. Then I started researching free web hosts again, tried a few but I found none to be feasible. Some offered ridiculously low web space, some offered only a sub-domain of their choice and a few wanted to watermark my blog with their logo (which I absolutely don’t like). For sometime, I considered buying a paid web hosting service. But for a relatively irregular blogger, paying up regularly just to keep the blog alive was not reasonable enough (for me). With all these fruitless research, I was angry and frustrated (with myself). At a point, I felt like what it might feel to a homeless migrant, my blog certainly did.
Finally, in a desperate attempt to make my blog live, I decided to return to blogger and started to tinker with it to accept my existing posts from wordpress. In almost every step, I ran into difficulties for which I had to look into second (even third) page of google to resolve. But at least my blogs are now live and I’m currently working on to fix the parts that are broken.
As I continue to work with blogger, I find it having all most all the features you may need for a decent blog. If a feature is missing then look around, you might find a third party plug-in or widget doing just that. I probably will write another post summarising my experience going through the migration from wordpress to blogger, as this post is already big for my standard.
Have you experienced this type of problems as well? Please share your story and what you did to deal with it.
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