Hello to all who read this! My last blog entry was February 26. After being missing for more than a month, I’m pretty much back! Yes, I’m alive.

Faded Out has been restored back to life, but a lot of it still remains broken. I am in the midst of midterms so I probably should have been studying, but I finally had the chance to at least get Faded Out back online and I felt really obligated to do so. I was getting really restless, knowing that Faded Out has been a 404 page for more than a month. You don’t know how upset I felt when I saw that this site does not even show up under the search results for Google anymore. I was pretty much devastated and it really hit me that I’ve been offline for FAR too long. So yes, I finally got Faded Out back online but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to straighten out all of the kinks.

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Since I don’t think I’ll be able to post regularly because of exams (plus I don’t feel right blogging when I know the rest of my site is in shambles…sigh), here’s what happened to Faded Out in the past month in case you’re curious.

I was hosted by SupahStar Host for about a year. The big whammie came in around late February or the beginning of March when the servers were down. They continued to be down for about an entire month (and as I type this, they are STILL down). SupahStar is under a reseller at First Hosting. Apparently, First Hosting’s data center “scammed” them (that is the exact word they used). So all of our websites were offline and apparently First Hosting had no way of contacting the data center. Then supposedly they were able to make a deal with the data center so that they would make our sites available for a short period of time in order for everyone to backup their sites, and then after that everything would be gone again.

I am happy to say I had the chance to backup my database. However, SupahStar did not have the chance to backup all of their clients’ sites, and I didn’t have enough of an advanced notice in order to backup my website files.

The real kicker of it all is that SupahStar has the worst communication I have ever seen from a host. They send out emails infrequently and I really mean infrequently. They use Twitter as their main source of contact. I have absolutely no needs for a Twitter. I was against getting one. But the only way I could ever receives updates from my host was if I subscribed to their Twitter! UGH! I hated it, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it and just decided to get a Twitter JUST for that. But then when this whole month-long server issue occurred, supposedly their email address was blocked (what????) and that meant that they wouldln’t be able to see our (the hostees’) emails if we need to talk to them. And the icing on the cake is that never responded to my Twitter messages either, even though they still update their Twitter regularly!!!! So it felt as if I was completely ignored, and there was no way to get in touch with them. I still haven’t spoken to them at all, and just decided to call it quits and move to a new host. If the owners of SupahStar ever see this (doubt it), I would REALLY appreciate a response back.

So…like I was saying, I didn’t get a chance to backup the files of my website. Which wasn’t a big deal at first because it was kind of unnecessary, since my entire site is powered by WordPress (and I was able to backup the database) and I have the original files on my computer). But I do NOT have the pictures folder, containing the pictures I upload to WordPress!!!  I did not realize this until a few hours ago when I was trying to figure out why my images were broken. Oh goodness……. It’s not like I lost the original files, but I don’t have the time or motivation to go through all of my blog posts and see what needs to be reuploaded. I am terribly sad about that. This all wouldn’t be such a big deal if my old host just didn’t have all of our files completely wiped out and gone! All I need is to backup one folder of pictures! But alas, I cannot…since everything is gone…

For now I’m being hosted by Audax Hosting (thank you so much for the minimal application process and the super quick set up).

So although I learned to backup my database regularly (like after every new blog post) after my hacking experience, I did NOT learn to backup the images folder in WordPress because I never posted pictures to the blog till the past year nor was I ever in a situation where the entire server just lost everything… Another lesson learned. Sigh.