I Pose the Question: What would you do if you lost all of your data?
This is something that we as internet marketers and entreprenuers sometimes don’t think about. The ones that have been burned are looking at their scars right now wondering how anyone could be so foolish but the reality is most of us don’t want to have to think about actually backing up our data. So we find ways to automate it or for some of us our insurance plan is crossing our fingers.
Although I’m not much on procrastination, I too am guilty of putting things off. In this case due to other business obligations. The web has not been filled with my recent experiences and the ones that were documented are now lost due to a very unfortunate issue with my datacenter. I’m not going to point the finger at cologuys.com *cough* but it seems that an unfortunate error with the datacenter not only knocked our server out of commission for a short period but did irrecoverable damage. They reclaimed our server.
So Why Didn’t You Pay the Bill?
This is typically the first thing that is assumed, well you didn’t pay your bill so it was reclaimed. But I happen to work in the hosting industry so I’m well accustomed to paying my monthly bill, it comes before eating when it comes down to the two for me, I’ll find a dollar to get some Ramen or a few bucks for rice and figure it out. The important thing to me is that my business is still online.
The bill was paid on time for close to 6 months before a mishap that occured when our server 
was issued came to frutation. It seems that one of the datacenter employees forgot to mark our server as deployed. They quite literally took down our live server, formatted our drives, and gave it to another client. The took down every person on our server, all of my sites included. This was why my site was down for so long. I was so busy restoring RocketScience Network to half mast everyone thought I had sudden problems with them. No guys sorry, not me, just busy as always. Busy in a whole new sense of the word.
Similar Troubles for Others
Interestingly enough shortly after a recent chat with Tyler Cruz, he had similar issues with all of his sites on his server and had his network go down as well he has written a post regarding this experience which rather than a datacenter issue (Tylerhosts with Hostgator someones head would roll for what happened to me but unfortunately I was not one with the Gator) he had a viral issue knock out his network. I have been pretty fortunate and have not been hacked nor have I received a virus to my knowledge on any of my sites which after working in the hosting industry I feel I am quite lucky in that respect. But it appears that he may have gotten a nasty bug that I was seeing pretty widespread for about a week on webservers where the index.php would display an error on line one. I actually received about 5 of these in one day before the exact cause of the issue was uncovered, so Tyler was not alone on this one.
Where does this leave me?
Well pretty close to where the title would let on. Fortunately I had some backups for about half of my sites. What is horrible is I had spent the last 6 months making them better so they are back to my original crappy autoblogs that I first learned with when I had so many domains and no content for them. So I didn’t have to start from scratch, the thought really makes me want to throw up I’ve worked very hard for the last 3 years to build this from the ground up. The last 6 months being some of the most productive in terms of getting things consistent between all of my sites. I currently run somewhere around 50 websites pretty much by myself so this has really put the future into perspective for me.
What does the future hold?
You will definitely notice the changes being re-implemented to the sites. This is a pretty involved manual process of restoring the site structures I had developed, some of the post content, and all of the processes and automations that make the network run. It’s really not an easy task to run 50 websites and work a full time job at Hostgator.
You will see more publication of what I’m doing online. It’s gotten quickly to the point that I really can’t keep up with everyone that wants to stay in contact with me so I’m just writing to everyone who’s listening. You will see my business and personal endevours mixed on this site.
You will find more content that is written for humans, not search engines. Yes, search engines are great but blogs aren’t for search engines, they are for people and sometimes it’s easy to overlook that when we are contantly looking at numbers. Each person is an individual that should be treated as so, and engaged in the content, not just hoping to land the next few hits and hope someone clicks your adsense link. There is much more to the process than that.
You will see more regularly updated content and larger posts for this site. Not all have the same focus but you will continue to see the improvements I outlined in my long lost posts from the last 6 months but the changes probably won’t be as subtle as they were whe I was learning and changing my ideals which is of course a neverending process but the last 6 months were some of the most notable in regards to overall understanding of how to effectively engage the concepts that I had been learning and apply them to my network.
The designs were lost as well so I’m at a scramble trying to make my sites look good again or at least tolerable. You don’t realize how much you do in half a year until it’s gone. For those of you that have never lost your data, take my advice and back it up.
For those of you that haven’t been knocked out by a virus, take Tyler’s advice.
For those of you that feel this isn’t really important, learn the hard way like us. It builds character.
And drink milk. Because it builds strong bones and don’t forget to switch to Geico while you’re at it. It could save you 15% or more on car insurance.
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