Yikes, too much drama this summer with my website!
At midnight on Monday/Tuesday, I finished my blogpost for Tuesday (here’s the link to Tuesday’s post if you couldn’t load it either!). I tried to preview the post to make sure I didn’t have any glaring errors, but instead of seeing the blogpost I got a white screen. I figured it was just a glitch, so I clicked “Publish” and assumed I could reload my website and see it after it joined the earlier posts. No such luck: another white screen.
Ever the optimist, I assumed that it was a problem with my Hostgator server and it would be fixed by the next morning. Wrong. White screen continued.
The weird thing was that I could get into my WordPress dashboard where I compose posts and get other information on my WordPress site. I couldn’t see anything wrong.
When I woke up on Tuesday, I got a message that my blogpost was delivered to my subscribers by Madmimi, my delivery company that is going out of business in a week and a half, boo. I clicked on the portion of the new blogpost so that I could read the rest of it, but again, I got a white screen. Grrrrr. I was angry.
I texted my new local IT guy and asked him if he could take a look. Also, I called Hostgator Support, and as usual, the Support people told me that it wasn’t a problem with the server so I had to call a web developer and ask him/her/them to figure it out. GRRRR, very angry!
At any rate, the problem continued. I called Hostgator back and tried to escalate my case. This time, the woman in the Support department told me she would try to escalate my case to the Escalator Support Team. Next morning, I got an email from the EST saying it wasn’t a server problem, and I had to handle it on my own.
My local IT guy told me to call them back at Hostgator and ask them to provide me with a backup of my website from before the problems started. I was told by Hostgator that I would have to pay them $150 for them to send me a backup. I paid them because I had no choice.
More problems. The Escalator Support Team emailed me at 3:30am telling me there wasn’t enough room on my cPanel (where the host stores things about the website) for the backup file and I would have to delete some things. I ignored it till the next morning, and then I emailed back saying I didn’t know how to delete some files I had been asking them to delete since early July.
Finally, I got an email reply from an EST person who was located in the US. Smart guy, he figured out why my website was having problems. He corrected the two errors that he saw, and my website became visible again. He even said I could get my money refunded if I no longer needed the backup! Yay!
Although the website still didn’t look right and was missing some key information (i.e. all of my blogposts!), my local IT guy was able to fix the website! And he backed up my site in case it happens again soon.
There are still tech decisions for me to make about the host company for my website, but for now, things look like they’re back to normal! I hope you haven’t given up on me. And I hope you’ll continue to see NSDB for Beauty Spotlight Team on Saturday and my regular posts next week! xoxoxoxo
I kept trying to bring up the blog and now I know why I couldn’t. I’m sorry about all this aggravation. I hope you don’t have a problem when choosing your mail service.
Thank you, Marcia. I have been pulling out my hair. I will probably try BirdSend, a service that Cordelia recommended. I dread having to switch.
I’m so glad you finally got competent help! I can’t believe what you’ve endured!
thank you, Gabrielle xoxo