Smart Mosch - Stop Throwing Articles Online!

In the beginning there was…setting up my blog

I’ve considered a great deal whether to publish this or not. But I’ve reached to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe others will learn and benefit form it.

I don’t really know under which category of mine to place this post, so I will place it under all of them. Thus, this post is smart article, smart mosching, smart poll, smart social networking (this is probably the one that can be left aside) and smart everything has to do with writing, publishing and content in general.

So, here goes: though I’m not in the habit of sharing my personal experiences as posts, every now and then, I like to do it and see others doing it. The only golden rule being to learn others, and to learn from others, something valuable.

So I would like to learn every single one of you the valuable lesson of eyeballing to your blog hosting provider. And for those of you not doing it already to back up your posts and every bit of information of your blog/ blogs. I’ve learned it the very hard way! You all know my blog, or you’ve all check it up at least once to see what’s the deal with me.  You’ve seen there some writing, some polls, some buttons to click on, basically everything a respectable blog requires. And, as it was easily noticeable, my choice as a provider was WordPress.

WordPress closing my admin account

Now get this, not too long after I’ve created it, and published a few times, and got some encouraging feedback from readers I woke up one morning and, surprise! I couldn’t access my account any more.  There was a big, scary message on my screen stating that I violated the terms of use and therefore WordPress closed my account. I could not believe my eyes! First thing to do was to turn my brains upside down and remember what could I have done to violate their terms of use? Of course, I couldn’t figure out anything that would even remotely get close to violating any terms of use.  After a few moments of dark, nervous and somewhat depressing thoughts mainly focused on “Damn, I’ve lost all my content!” I moved to the next sensible thing to do.

That was to send a message to WordPress to tell them that my account was closed and ask them to check it up and give me access again. Or, at least, explain why they’ve closed it. Long story short, they didn’t checked back with me. So I had to put my creative mind to work and figure out how to retrieve my lost content first. Needless to say, none of my posts were saved anywhere on my computer. But I remembered that a friend of mine followed my blog on RSS from work. So together we went to his office, digged trough his computer and managed to save all my data. Lucky me for his wise decision to follow my posts!

The busy part came after all that. I had to buy my own domain, to learn and install all kind of stuff to make it similar to my old one. And to let everybody know I’ve moved my blog to a new address. And that is truly painful. I could finally do it, as I was at the begging of this publishing online experience. But what if this happens to someone with a lot more followers and an impressive archive?

Now, the thing making me decide to publish all this “unique” experience is something that recently happened. All the plugins installed, in order for me to have the same functionalities and similarities as my old blog, started throwing bugs. I could not publish any new post and I could not fix anything. So I had to go to a specialist, pay him a substantial amount of money to fix my many bugs so I can start publishing again.

Free stuff doesn’t always work

So, dear fellow writers, pay close attention to whoever is hosting your site or blog, and consider that maybe it’s worth paying a monthly fee to have your content secured. I ended up paying a lot of money, waste a lot of time and energy to correct what proved to be a network error. I am saying this, because after two weeks from the moment WordPress deleted my account, they sent me a message saying that they don’t know what happen, they re-opened my blog and they are sorry about the trouble caused. But by then I already had a new blog hosted somewhere else!

And now the conclusion:

Here I am, my blog finally up and running and me being able to tell the story and share my experience. I am however doing some research as to what might be the best platform of blog hosting and what prices they have. Free stuff is not always the best way to go, and in my case, free stuff proved to be really expensive in the end.