Bloggers Nightmare

Ask any blogger you want that has been blogging for almost a year, or has became addicted to his blog what is his/her worst nightmare he/she will answer you “To get my blog screwed up and my database corrupt”.

Well this nightmare, I dreamed this last week. You have most likely notice the blog going off, showing a fresh new installation, then back again showing all posts and again showing just half post. Well all those were my attempts to recover my blog and have it work as it should.

After I installed the SABRE plugin everything start to act weird. In the admin’s dashboard I was able to see the 404 error page of the blog, and all those messy things. A real mess to be honest, a mess I would never want to have again. My main concern was to keep the database safe and the wordpress theme design. Thanks god I always keep my design works backed on my desktop, pen drive and even in a server uploaded (yeah..too much I know, i should also keep them on emails?:P).

Anyway, I did not had backed up the database for awhile. And as you can notice there are numerous posts dated at 24th February, posts which I could recover manually from the old database as I did not purged.

Now I would not want to blame SABRE plugin, but neither can say it wasn’t really SABRE’s fault. But believe is that something wrong happened with Apache and PHP/MySQL install on the server (since it was moved just 10 days ago). After several emails asking the support staff of the old hosting what exactly is going on since this was affecting all the blogs I have on that same server, answer which I never managed to obtain and after losing already rankings for my homepage and for some other internal pages I decided that I had no more time for their support staff and it was time to move server.

After a small research on the web and after few positive testimonials (and some other bad reviews as well, but that is normal with web hosting companies) I decided to pack my stuff and move over at HostNine. The reasons were mainly two, 1). did not wanted to waste my time any longer and lose all my rankings and 2). the hosting plans with HostNine were (it would be mean to say reasonable) really cheap and the features were exactly what I needed for my seo blog (just In case you have intentions to order a hosting with HostNine, you can use the coupon code H9 during the order and get 50% discount on the first order, this does not recur on next billing. So for example if you order for 12 months hosting you pay only 6 months).

The order was pretty easy and the account was setup after few hours (reasonable time really, but not instant) and I was ready to install the new version of WordPress and use the backup SQL database for all my content and other features. Apparently the backup was not as I expected and there were bugs, mainly..the categories I had were not included in the database so all posts were marked under “uncategorized” category.

Considering the amount of posts the blog has, it would have been a real pain to assign each post to its proper category manually. Then I came to knowledge (Thanks to Google search engine heh) about this really useful plugin for these cases, it is called Batch Categories. With the use of Batch Categories plugin I was able to assign multiple posts at once to the proper category. The options are simple but useful, you can filter posts by title and use wildcards as well. Once the posts are filtered you can check box for the posts you want to assign to a category, and then just click on Submit to category…Done. This plugin saved me a lot of working hours and made everything less stressful than what actually could be doing it manually.

In simple words, SEO Optimization blog was saved, the old hosting company already created doubts to me about their reliabilities after years I have been with them, but will still give them a second chance. This is just what has happened to me during this past week, I struggled much more to save this blog as it sits in my heart and left behind my hands and refused customers during this period, but finally it is saved and rolling again 😉

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