Tag: hosting

Where did my website go

I lost my plant-based website a few months ago, but didn’t realize that the hosting provider had deleted my instance until recently. When my integrations started complaining, I did some troubleshooting and discovered the loss. Yes, I should have paid more attention to the fact that a change in billing would have affected my host’s auto pay. But unfortunately the notifications stopped coming…because MX records for my mail host were also being hosted at the hosting provider.

Sadly, I came to discover that everything had been deleted, including my backups due to the length of time that the bill had not been paid (approximately 3 months). I had to start a new cloud instance and reload LAMP/WordPress install from scratch. There are few more tasks to do before my site is full resurrected again; so if something breaks, please be patient while I fix it.

Ah well, it was nice to re-learn everything again!

Adventures in cloud hosting

Free hosting drama has brought my site postings to a virtual standstill in the last 6-8 months. It took me a long time to decide on a new home for my websites, which is why there haven’t been too many entries on subjects such as gardening or cooking.

But I think I’ve found at semi-permanent home at cloud hosts Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Both cloud services offered a free tier on which I could flex my Linux muscle and try self-hosting WordPress remotely.

After several weeks of experimentation and false starts (notably a Bitnami solution that was a headache to learn on top of all the other things I need to be familiar with), I can report that my sites are back up and running. At least temporarily. If administration doesn’t suck up too much of time, I hope to catch up on all the posts from the past year, which I will likely compress in weekly or monthly summaries.

Suffice it to say, my current hosting set up consists of Ubuntu 16.04 running Apache/PHP/MariaDB, with Webmin control panel for client administration. There’s obviously more under the hood, but these are the major aspects.

Let the blogging continue…or restart.