You may have come to my blog recently and found nothing there. There is a reason for this. I screwed up and with a disaster of circumstances, I lost everything.

Here’s my story:

I received an automated message from my hosting site that their software detected that I might have an insecure version of Wordpress and to please upgrade it. Wanting to be a good netizen, I decided to upgrade it right away.

My first mistake: I didn’t do a backup. I know better than that but I took a flyer.

My second mistake: I didn’t do a proper upgrade. I didn’t deactivate my plug-ins.

My third mistake: I used Fantastico to do my upgrade. If you have ever made ANY changes to your blog, it doesn’t work.

My fourth mistake: When I started getting error messages and no blog, I went to my hosting service help desk for help. After two responses from them that were wrong I went to a Wordpress blog that said I should delete a certain plug-in. That didn’t work.

Within just a few hours I got a message from my hosting service they had moved my main site to a temporary server because I was using too many cpu resources and that it had to do with a PHP application but they couldn’t tell me which one. They also told me if I didn’t fix it in seven days they would shut down my account.

Geez Louise… I knew that the only thing I had changed was my blog. Frustrated, I deleted my blog. Several months of blogging was gone.

Then I went searching and found out on forums that Wordpress version 2.5.1 had caused the same problem as me. Too high cpu resources usage. Some sites had been shut down completely by their hosting sites.

There are several lessons to be learned here but the biggest one is before I think about a change to Wordpress, I will backup everything including the database.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.