Let me tell you a story of technological failure and very upsetting circumstances. In the
far away land of last Tuesday, we sent out our second issue of the Paper Lantern Lit
Newsletter, expecting nothing more than to bask in the glory of how awesome we are and
maybe get some more entries into our contest through the quiz I spent a really long time
making. But, as is true of all web heroes, my victory was to be short lived. The newsletter
went out at 10:30am. By 11am I had a frantic text message on my phone that the blog
was not working. Trying not to jump to the most awful of conclusions, I simply wrote
back: “Give it time. There might just be too much traffic. It just does that sometimes. It
will right itself. “
Maybe this was my great folly and the karmic words that tempted fate, because later, as
I was in a car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on my way to White Plains I got an
email:
Subject: blog
Message: STILL NOT WORKING.
So I spent the next hour of the car ride on the phone with GoDaddy trying to get it sorted
out. The ultimate answer? “It’s a problem with a plugin, but since that’s not really our
problem, you’re going to have log in and fix it yourself.” Now normally, being a
somewhat-savvy web programmer, this would not have been an issue. But to log into the
blog, it would first have to be WORKING!
I could bore you with all the technical details of all the things I did next (and after that
and after that for the rest of the day) including some more yelling at GoDaddy and
an email I wrote entirely in caps in which I stated that I was NOT HAPPY about four
times, but, like I said, it would be boring. Long story short: our database was completely
corrupted and even after a full uninstall and reinstall was still not working. So we
kicked GoDaddy hosting for our blog to the curb and have migrated to this new, shiny
Wordpress.com page!
Unfortunately, we lost all our old blog posts (so sad!) but we are looking forward to
bringing you spectacular new content from this point forward. Spectacular new content
that you will be able to read! Because the blog works! So, hurray for ultimate victories!
I have won the Internet.
Thanks for reading and sticking with us through our technology catastrophe. We’ll be
back to posting normally this week and hopefully this is the worst tech-tastrophe we will
ever have (knocks on wood!).
What is the worst technology letdown that ever happened to you? Commiserate with us in
the comments. I know I personally have plenty more stories I could share!
Keep reading!
-Beth
Paper Lantern Lit 
This is great to know. Thanks for sharing. I started out at GoDaddy for my webpage because of the cheap domain name purchase. Then I was spending too much time working on PHP and modifying it. I helped a client move from MediaTemple to BlueHost and not only was it cheaper it was also faster. You can read the reviews from WordPress here. http://wordpress.org/hosting/
That’s awful!
Try installing the wp-backup plugin now. You can set it to backup to a server or via email as often as you want, which will hopefully stop you from losing everything again!