This is right up there with the blue screen of death

A couple of weeks ago I was messing around inside my webhosting account. My goal was to install a shopping cart so that I could do all kinds of neat things like sell ebooks and memberships while also being able to set people up as affiliates. I managed to install the software and I thought all was well, but I had inadvertently deleted several wordpress databases in the proccess.

What this means is that I had upwards 50 – 60 web pages that I’ve created over the past few years disappear without a trace. It wasn’t bad enough that I did this, I also failed to realize for a day or so that I had just effectively neutered three websites while being so proud of myself for setting up my new shopping cart.

An odd sense of calmness descended on me while I contemplated all the work and effort I’d put into my websites only to see them destroyed instantly with the reckless deletion of databases. I realized that I had been making weekly backups of my main and biggest blog, but I wasn’t sure if I’d have to reinstall Wordpress, plus all my plugins and themes and all that. It would be at least an hour or maybe more to get it back up again. Nothing too crazy right? But then it dawned on me to contact my webhosting company – this just happens to be Geekhosting.com, a company that I’ve been using since 2007.

These guys saved my bacon.

I did some research online and learned that if you have a good quality webhost, that they should be taking regular backups of your site and should be able to get your back in mishaps like the one that I caused. However, when I chose Geekhosting a few years ago it wasn’t because of dependability or anything like that – it was all about the price. Geekhosting offered me the most affordable webhosting option for my needs plus they gave deep discounts on paying for a full year at a time. Now I had to see if their service was also up to the task.

I sent in the help ticket, marked it as urgent and crossed my fingers. Within two hours I had a reply from the tech staff that they could restore the databse files so long as I could provide the last four digits of the credit card used to pay for my hosting. Once this number was provided, within 2 or 3 hours the sites were back up like they had never been down.

So anyway, I just wanted to write a post to thank Geekhosting for doing a great job  preventing my own self-induced headaches and lost content. I highly recommend them and guess what – they don’t even have an affiliate program (that I know of) so this post is free and clear of ulterior motives.

Check em out if you’re looking for a new webhosting provider.