Phew, that was a little unexpected.
For those of you who haven’t had the misfortune of reading my hand-wringing tweets and woe-ridden facebook updates, let me condense it for you.
Just after midnight on the 24th December (Christmas Eve no less – bastards), my previous site hosts suspended the website without warning. They cite some kind of server overload… CPU mega-usage which meant that they had to immediately shut down Lipglossiping to protect others on the same server.
When I picture the scene in my head… I visualise sirens going off in some hi-tech basement somewhere, sexy lab-coated men running… frantic in their endeavours to hit the switch before the cyber world implodes, caused by the domination of lipstick-loving women everywhere.
In reality, some fat bloke in Chipping Norton (probably) scratched his balls and sighed at the realisation that he’d have to put down his pickled onion Space Raiders before clicking the big fat red X on my hosting package (and nearly my Christmas too).
This in itself isn’t a huge problem… these things happen (though prior warning would have been nice). What IS a problem, is the fact that when they turned things back on, only half the site came back. At some point between fatso putting down the crisps and hitting the “on” switch… the database had become corrupted. Marvellous.
So I did what any self-respecting 29yr old would do in this situation. I cried. Then I shouted at Mr. L and made him feel as guilty as I could for not backing up since mid-December. Then I ate a box of Lindt chocolates and got over it.
This is the ‘condensed’ version, I promise.
That whole “getting over it” thing didn’t last long when we discovered that the backup from mid-December was also corrupt. Infact, I may have cried some more at this point. Ok, I definitely did. Our hosts were useless… infact, their epic proportions of uselessness extended to having the gall to say “You do know that by having more than one backup on our system, you’re breaking our T&C”. Upon reading that insightful bit of wisdom, my face was a perfect picture of “Oh no you di’nt”.
Long story short (no really, I’m nearly done now)… we’ve since moved to a new site host (hemorrhaging more money than I thought possible on a blog about makeup) and won a battle with some evil timelords (our original hosts) who made it as difficult as they could to transfer the domain name across (this is what has actually taken the time). I’ve been monotonously copying and pasting missing posts across from Google Reader (thank god it archives them) for the last 10 days and am now ready to give up blogging for good.
Well, nearly.
So what does this mean for the site? Well… there might be some bugs lurking and I’ve lost all the comments made since November 26th. This includes the Advent giveaway. Those of you on Twitter know that this is the thing I’m most upset about… it’s one thing to lose my efforts, it’s quite another to lose yours. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about this though and the whole thing will have to be re-run (starting in the next couple of days).
Other than this, things should be pretty much as we left them… hopefully. If you notice any bugs or have any issues with things loading or site slowness I’d be really, really grateful if you could let me know.
