Author Journey (September 22, 2025)
Well damn, I can’t say that I was expecting this! There have been a lot of ups and downs so far this year, but this is by far the most frustrating one yet. A normal person might just call it a day, but then, I’ve never claimed to be normal!
Author Journey (September 22, 2025)
What happened?
Basically, the company that host this website had a catastrophic server error, which took this site offline for almost the entire day on September 12. Apparently, they managed to fix the software and restored things to normal, but I’m not quite seeing that. Since then, anytime that I attempt to upload a new image, the CPU and physical memory usage spikes on the server, which forces the site to go offline. Sometimes, it’s only a couple of minutes and sometimes it’s much longer.
This means that I am unable to add new posts with new images, which is what every new post contains. I couldn’t even add a new title image for this post, so I just used a picture from the media files, and that crashed things several times before I was able to get it to stick. This is obviously a fairly stressful way to blog. Thankfully, I have backups of the site, but I won’t know for sure if that will fix the issue, so I’m going to run some parallel stuff offline. This will be my last post until I get it resolved. The site will remain up as normal (some of the time!) and comments seem to be working.
I’ve no idea on timelines, but I certainly don’t intend on giving up. I will get things running again even if I have to rebuild this site from scratch. Well, I still have all the images on my computer and copies of all the posts so it’s not entirely from scratch, but I would need to recreate them individually if the backup doesn’t fix the problem. In that scenario, I will need to wipe my partition on the server and start fresh. I hope that isn’t the case, but I can’t rule it out just yet.
What are you planning?
Either way, I have some work ahead of me. It’s going to be time-consuming and tedious, but I am determined to recover, and come back stronger. I’m definitely not going to rush as I think this is the ideal moment to take a look at things that can be removed from the site. There’s a lot of stuff sitting in the background that aren’t being utilised, and likely have an impact on the way the site runs.
This is absolutely not the post I wanted to write this week, or any week, for that matter. Hopefully, I’ll have things back up and running as soon as possible, however, at this stage, it’s too soon to put any real timeline on it. In the meanwhile, why not take a moment to check out one of the other 2,855 posts. Anyhow, thanks for reading, and wish me luck!
Very very sorry to hear this! I hope you can get it sorted. Not sure who your hosting provider is, but it doesn’t seem like they have a firm handle on things. Not if they’ve declared the site operational and it isn’t.
I’ve been using TigerTech since 2003, and they’ve been fantastic. I live in constant fear they’ll get bought out and enshittified! They manage the OS and databases. I just have to install and update WordPress. If something happens to TigerTech, I might switch to AWS and run my own server; but that’ll be more pricey. I wouldn’t recommend AWS if you don’t have a background in managing operating systems.
I hope not only can you get it sorted, but you can find a provider that treats you better.
Good luck!
Thanks. It’s a huge pain in the ass! I am looking for a new provider, but this is also one of the biggest and best rated companies in Canada. Whether that’s a good thing or not I’m not sure…
Currently, I just rent the space on the server, but I could be convinced to use something that is maintained in the background and I can just worry about the front end.
I also recently discovered that the plugin I used to export to word isn’t working either… so I’m now saving a html version of every page to my hard drive. Like I said, a huge pain in the ass.
Hopefully, I can some restored soon. At least everything that is already there will continue to work.
Thanks again.
What a pain! I’m so sorry to hear this. Your blog is so voluminous, I know the thought of having to piece it back together is stressful. I hope you find a resolution soon and get back to producing the content that I love!
Thanks. It’s not the way I was expecting the year to pan out. Hopefully, I will get it up and running smoothly again soon. I’m just making sure I have good backups of everything before I begin. As you might imagine, it’s taking a while! Thanks again.
Ooof! That sounds terrible! It’s a good thing you have back ups of all your blog post files. I really should be doing that too, but honestly I forget most of the time and what’s posted is the only copy I have. This is a great reminder for all of us, make copies of our content! I really hope your hosting troubles get resolved soon.
Thanks. It’s not been a ton of fun so far… A big concern I have is with the structure of the database now. It’s looking like a rebuild but at least I do have copies of images and posts. Still exploring some options, but hope to be back soon.
Oh ! So that’s what occurred? I’m a frequent visitor to your site. Good to know that things are back to normal. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for being a regular. That means a lot. I hope to have things fully back to normal as soon as possible. Thanks again!
Haven’t heard from you for awhile — I hope all’s well!
Thanks. I hadn’t realised that it’s been several days since I liked or commented on anything. Going through a big real-life family-event which has taken up almost all my time, which is why I haven’t made much progress with getting things back up and running. At the moment, I think I’m aiming for a relaunch in the New Year, but will be around between then and now, lurking on other blogs!
Thanks for the concern. I hope is going well with you to!
long time science I heard from u
and I am really sorry for your loss
Hi Lynn, hope things are on the mend! Glad to hear that you’ve got backups, at least 🙂
Hey, it’s going slow, but I am working on getting things running again. Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer although life does seem to want to get in the way at the moment. Thanks