When your web hosting company closes you down unexpectedly, that’s one big challenge. When you’ve got 50 sites, that’s a huge challenge. When something goes wrong with the process of restoring the backup files for 50 sites, THAT… is a nightmare.

And that’s what I’ve been wrestling with these last few days.

Here’s why.

My old host suspended me for having too many files on my unlimited disk space hosting account. Yep, it’s in the fine print that you cant have too many files… but it would have been nice if they had given me the 14 days they wrote to me about. It was 14 days to remove the excessive files or they would close me down. TWO DAYS LATER, they suspended all my sites. Not nice, if you ask me.

Well, I asked them to change their mind but they said no. Next I asked for FTP access (so I could download my web content) and CPanel access (so I could download the .sql files) to my content on their servers – and they said yes. So I busied myself with a great deal of downloading. Remember that’s 50-something sites.

Then at my new hosting (which is with Hostnine), I used Fantastico to create a new WordPress blog at each of my blog sites… which is most of my sites. Think: big big job. Lots of sore back time.

Well, for this story, let’s just use one example… garyharvey.net, this site.

STEP BY STEP

Fantastico installed a new WP blog, just the default blog with the boring Kubrick them. But it was working, so… we’re doing okay so far. Read the rest of this entry

Webmasters, could your hosting account get SUSPENDED? Mine did today. Read this to find out why – and how to protect yourself from this happening to you.

Yes, it’s a bit of a confession really.

Here’s what I wrote to my readers to explain why the sites were all offline.
________

“What a nuisance! My website hosting account has been suspended. It seems that I’m over-using the system’s resources.

So what they do is just turn off your ENTIRE hosting account.

That means ALL the websites you’ve got with that host suddenly become unavailable. Sorry!

I’m using Bluehost for most of my sites but I guess it could be any of the cheaper hosting companies who are running hundreds of sites on the same server. They have to do this to provide service to all their other clients. Understandable enough.

So what triggered this?

I’m still waiting for login access to be restored so I can check this, but my best guess at this point is that I set up AUTOMATIC WEEKLY BACKUPS of all my WordPress sites.

Silly me. I set them up one after another, so they are probably all trying to run at the same time. No wonder the server guys are saying this account is overloading their system.

BIG LESSON. When you set up automatic backups, make sure you dont turn them all on at the same time. Make a list of the sites you want to backup (should be all of them, I’d say) and set up the backups over a span of days.

TWITTER. I posted a brief note about this on Twitter so if you’re following me there, you would have seen it.

ONE SITE THAT ISNT DOWN
…is http://iamgettingoldfast.com/giveaway/go/1613 which is the massive giveaway that Russell Brunson has organized. Definitely worth a look. Read the rest of this entry