What to do when your site disappears

Jan 12, 2011 | 30 Day Blog Challenge, Bright Wings articles, Change, Motivation, Writing

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!

Is it time to hit the panic button yet?

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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