Time To Roll Again On This Messed Up Blog

It was august of 2017.  I was told that my blog will be back online in 24 hours.  It wasn’t.

5 Days later… it still wasn’t.

More time passed and after many phone calls and sleepless nights, it showed up.

But what I saw horrified me.

A skeleton of my old blog.

My business suffered a tremendous glitch, compliments of GoDaddy, and I was beside myself.

I can’t lie…

I yelled.  I cried.  I hit my pillow.  I used words unknown to my mouth.  It didn’t fix or change anything.

It’s taken me 6 months to even step back inside this blog!

Here’s what happened.

I have a few blogs, two of which I use for business.  I use this one for general business information and I have another one specific to my travel business.  I blog on them every week, sometimes a couple or three times a week.  I’ve had both blogs since 2008.

Well, GoDaddy told me they needed to upgrade my hosting servers and assured me everything would be fine.  As it turned out, it was NOT fine.

After two weeks, I ended up in critical recovery with GoDaddy and at the end of the day, I lost the last three years of work on both blogs, never to be recovered.

THREE years of my own written content and artistic creatives that I can’t recover times TWO BLOGS!  I didn’t save them anywhere.  I thought they were safe on my blog!

Additionally…

ALL my categories are gone.

ALL my tags are gone.

ALL the work I paid a programmer to do to make CSS changes to my blog over the last three years are gone.

ALL the updated links on hundreds of blog posts are gone. (Ironically, I had just spent the first 6 months of 2017, going into hundreds and hundreds of old blog posts and updating links. Those are all defaulted back to the outdated ones!)

ALL my creative graphics I made are gone.

ALL my travel ventures and experiences during those three lost years, my recommendations, pictures… GONE.  We take several vacations a year.  OMG, this hurts.

GoDaddy’s response?  “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

That’s it.  “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

It’s more than inconvenient!  It’s my life’s work for the last three years on TWO blogs plus the income I received off of those blogs not to mention loss of SEO!

I had no recourse.

Now I’m left with a blog that has no categories, tags, old outdated links and it looks like July 28, 2015 which was the most recent blog post that managed to survive.

Oh, and about that?

My blog did NOT get upgraded to the server it needed to be on.  They were too afraid to do anything else so it’s still sitting on a newer, but still outdated hosting account.

It’s embarrassing as well!

It’s  embarrassing to know people come by my blog and see the old outdated stuff.  It’s not professional.  And when they click on old blog posts, things don’t link right.

It’s embarrassing when people go to Google and search for information where my blog content comes up but when they click on it, they get an ERROR 404 page, no such content.  I have three years of content that people are finding and getting this error message.

This hurts my blog’s SEO as well.

In business, first impressions are important!  I’m not doing much of that these last 6 months!  It makes me want to hide under a rock!

The Thought Of Starting Over Is Exhausting

This happened in August of 2017.  It’s now the end of January 2018.  This will be my first blog post since the event and no, nothing is updated.  I literally just logged into today.  It’s been such a nightmare.

For the last 6 months, the thought of starting over to update hundreds and hundreds of links in my blog going back to 2007, is exhausting since I just did that last year.

The thought of creating new content and being excited and diligent to keep my blog up to date (times 2 blogs) leaves me in no way confident that this will not happen again.

My mindset and negativity about the whole thing has absolutely sabotaged my willingness to even put one foot in front of the other and start blogging again.  I’ve stayed away.

UGH!

Add up your last 3 years of work hours.  That’s what I’ve lost!  The revenue from that content is gone.

Not to mention the artistic creatives that I can’t recover.  I didn’t save them anywhere.  I thought they were safe on my blog.

YES!  I’M WHINING!  I’M MAD!  WAAAAAHHHHH!  Can the world hear me!?

And……… I’m over it.

Do I really have a choice?

No.

Not unless I want to close up shop, sell my domain, and go do something else.

So now what?

Well, I’ve had my time away, I’ve had my temper tantrum, I’ve shared what happened, not that anyone cares, and now I’m ready to re-enter world of blogging and start giving value to my readers once again.  It feels like starting over and I guess that what I’m doing here.

I have thought about it…  ALOT.

I have a plan to get started.

Now it’s time to take action.

My next blog post will be about those things right there.  Think, Plan. Action.

After all, if it happened to me, it’s happened to others.  It may have happened to you or someone you know.  Or, maybe it will happen to you in the future and by me sharing my experiences and game plans, it may help you.

So today, I write my first blog post since the event.

I will assign it the first category back on this blog, thinking “business lessons” may be appropriate.

I will give it the first tags back on the blog.

I will give it three new graphic creatives I made in Canva.

I’m back on my feet.  My tears are wiped.  I’ve dusted off.  I’m back on the train and I feel it beginning to move.

Peace.

I’m off to fix me a cup of much needed Earl Gray tea with lots of cream and sugar.

Debbie

PS:  If you know what I’m talking about, leave me a comment.  Leave your rant.  Tell me what happened to you.  Others may not care, but I do.  I really do.  Please share.