Lessons I Learned From Losing my Sites

As you may know, both this site and Sucky Poems went down last week for a couple of days.  It turns out that the 1and1 databases were not compatible with the upgrade to the newest version of WordPress and it wiped out one site’s database while messing up many of the features of the other site including not displaying the index page.  Through the whole fiasco, I learned a few lessons and things about myself that I wanted to share, so here it goes:

I enjoy blogging and will not give up.

I spent about a year on each of my sites creating content, fixing it up and tweaking just about anything that can be tweaked, and in one moment everything was lost.  Sometimes when a loss it too great, it is common to just give up.  When I was left sitting at my computer with nothing to show for a whole year’s worth of my work, I was determined to start over put in the extra effort to recreate everything I possibly could.   

Until this point, I had no idea how long I would continue to update my sites.  Now I know that they are here to stay.

Always back up all of your information.

With computers, it is so easy to back up information that it is a wonder why everyone doesn’t do it.  Computers make everything much simpler but they also make it much simpler to erase everything that you’ve ever done.  Your computer can crash, your server can crash, you can drop your pda in a puddle, or lose your information in so many other ways.  There are programs that can back up all of your information automatically on a regular basis, so why not do it.  If you want to do it yourself and it’s something small, you can just email it to yourself.  For bigger files, you can get an external hard drive and copy everything to that. 

Don’t rely on anybody else but yourself for something really important.

Don’t think that just because a company like 1and1 says that they back up your files that they really do or that even if they do, they will get them to you in time to save your work.  1and1 failed me and I am still waiting for them to get back to me for over a week on some of my files.  I was lucky that I backed up all of my work on my own computer and was able to fix things myself.  At first it didn’t work because of the compatibility issues but with a little tweaking, I was able to get everything back up.

Go ahead and trust others with anything that doesn’t really matter or things that can be fixed with a little effort.  But when it comes to something with no remedy, you probably want to do it yourself because nobody cares about what’s important to you as much as you do.

Use companies who care about your business and have great customer support.

I can’t say this enough, if a company doesn’t have good customer service, it is not worth giving them your business.  I made the mistake by staying with 1and1 until this point.  Find out about the level of customer support for all of your services before signing up and especially before you need them and it’s too late.  Also, as part of this lesson, make sure that the support speaks your language fluently.  It doesn’t help if the customer support speaks a broken English and doesn’t understand what you are trying to say.

Internalize the lessons you learn.

You live and learn every single day but it is important to keep going over all of your lessons to master them and let them become second nature to you.  Just by reading something once, you may become familiar with it but to really know something and internalize it, you need to go over it many times.

When reading a book, the average person only takes away about 3 concepts.  When it comes to advertising, a person needs to see an add 7 times before he remembers the ad and what it’s for.   If there is something you really want to “know”, read it over a few times and then make a point of coming back to it.  Even better, internalize it by following it and making it part of who you are.