Over the weekend, this site and a group of related sites went through a meltdown that took it offline for a couple of days, and, left it incomplete when it was rebooted.
The simple explanation is that a WordPress plug-in started behaving in a way that triggered the attention of the support team at my server company, BlueHost. They shut the site down and when I went to identify where the problem, I couldn’t find any easy fix and decided to wipe the server clean and do an install with a week-old backup.
Ironically, I back up my SQL databases regularly. That wasn’t doing the trick in terms of getting the site to run right, though. Someone, the plugin that was causing the slow SQL requests had disrupted core scripts in my WordPress engine. Doing a full reinstall of WordPress and reloading the database didn’t have the effect I was looking for.
So, I 
lost a week of posts and development from the root domain. Frustrating. And, given the way that my posts get redistributed around the social Web, I’ve got a week of bad links floating around. Which is not good for my site, and personally somewhat embarassing.
The purpose of this post is to let you all know that I don’t think I’m out of the woods yet. Something has changed with my host company, BlueHost, I think, and I’m going to shift my little network of blogs over to a dedicated server. This will take a little bit of time to set up, and I’m not wholly confident that my installations isn’t going to trip something on the BlueHost servers in the meantime.
According to the folks at BlueHost, I’ve got one strike left. If I use it up, they’ll shut me down for good!
So bear with me over the next week or so as I get my servers, domains and installation issues all ironed out.
Thanks!
