Two month old backups meant lost content for me yesterday. Five posts are gone, poof.
Yesterday morning my website host, iPage notified me that my site was creating a huge server load and suspended service.
For a site that receives around 500 hits per month I knew immediately it wasn’t something I did. Yes my last blog post was stellar and was higher on the traffic scale but it wasn’t enough to cause iPage to shut my site down.
iPage support could tell that something within my index.php file was causing the issue. That meant a full re-install of WordPress and recreating my content from a two month old backup database file. The support iPage provided during the re-installation was professional. iPage has the best support 24/7 year round.
All together my reestablish process took hours. Time was lost and the missing posts will be recreated within a few days because of my RSS feed.
My RSS feed may just have saved the day. I subscribe to my own RSS feed as an email backup of my posts. That RSS feed may have saved the day.
Lessons learned:
- Don’t rely on email backups
- Backup more than quarterly
- Know how to restore your site before you begin
- Save images on a hard disk not just on your site
Yeah there were more lessons, like not cursing at inanimate objects etc.
Thinking of a new website host? Get iPage.