Greg Hartnett

Unfortunately, for reasons unbeknownst to both myself and my host (MidPhase) my blog went down last week. I got the standard Wordpress error screen that I couldn’t establish a connection to the database. I have gotten these many times in the past, and I figured that the problem would correct itself in a matter of minutes (or hours at the long end). After 36 hours of no change, I decided to escalate the issue and contact MidPhase technical support.

After just a few minutes on hold, a representative submitted a ticket to the tech department, and assured me that my issues would be addressed post haste. After a handful of hours, I was disappointed to see that the issue remained unresolved. Another phone call to MidPhase tech support brought me the same results, and further assurances.

A weekend trip to San Francisco with the family pulled me away from the computer, but I was unpleasantly surprised to see on Sunday that the damn blog was still down (now bringing up a blank page at the index). When I finally returned home, I was able to check my email and found that MidPhase felt it was a plugin that was keeping things from getting cleared up.

After deactivating each of the plugins and resetting my blog to the default WP template, I was delighted to see that I could at least access the blog. Regrettably, all data between late January and early March had been lost. On the bright side, I have been very neglectful in maintaining my blog, so I only lost a couple of posts.

Lesson learned: make frequent backups of your data. There are lots of ways to do it, and it’s pretty simple. If I was a real blogger, this could have been catastrophic.  There are perks to obscurity