Losing affordableacadia!!

This is what I saw when I tried to access my site.

This past week has been tough. Affordableacadia.com started fading away last Saturday, February 5. At first I thought it was a regional internet glitch, but as time went on, into Sunday, I started to get worried. I emailed my tech guru and he said all his sites were down too. After another day or so I got the news: The website host, the guy who owns all the servers for many, many websites died, and his grieving family simply “pulled the plug”. Everything that is on a website, all the text, pictures, sidebar gadgets, traffic statistics, everything, resides on the hard drives of the host’s server. Lots of people were in a panic. People with dozens of sites who rely on them for their income were suddenly helpless. People who take money for access had to face angry subscribers. It was bad.

Finally, another hosting firm was designated by the family to sort out the mess.  Slowly, starting Tuesday, some sites started to come back on the new servers. I considered taking the easy way out and just transferring to them, but I didn’t like the fact that they didn’t have a phone number. I had no way to communicate with them except by “ticket”, a kind of dedicated email, and they were very slow to respond, and incapable of grasping complex issues. To be fair, they were dealing with a huge mess, and I was small potatoes. But they were simply “out there somewhere” and I felt helpless.

The Grand Theater, Ellsworth, Maine

I decided I wanted someone local. After all, I’m here in Maine trying to promote the Maine experience and so I started looking for a web hosting company nearby. Fortunately, WERU, our local community radio station has such a host and so I signed up with svaha.com. The contact person, who I didn’t get permission to name, spent many hours trying to get me up and running. I’m impressed.

What I take away from all this is the need to back up my website. It is also necessary to understand the type of backup you are doing, because you may end up with only text. The pulling of the plug could have easily been a fire, hurricane, molasses flood or rampaging gorilla, you never know.  The other lesson is the local contact. I know where my new host lives!

Read how this disaster unfolded at Warrior Forum.

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