Wednesday, January 19, 2011

WordPress Scare

The website for my book and publishing company, myhousehistory.net, is hosted by axspace.com and written on the WordPress platform. It has been working nicely for a couple of years now. Last week I attempted to log in on the site to make some updates. When I clicked on the log in icon, I was taken to a blank white page. What the heck???

Searching the web for help with the issue, I came upon numerous people who have had a similar problem with their WordPress sites. (The reason I selected WordPress to begin with, as opposed to the much more simple blogger site, is that I wanted my site to look like a regular website but have the flexibility to change content and blog on the site as well.) Much of what was discussed in the forums was over my head. There were a lot of references to plugins and going in to deactivate them, but my thinking was that I have not added any plugins (nor do I know how to!) and if a person can't log in to their site, how in the world can she go in and deactivate the plugins?

I contacted the woman who constructed the site for me as she can log in remotely as an administrator. She was unable to log in from her computer as well. She told me she would have to reinstall my WordPress theme and rebuild the website. And she wasn't sure how long that would take her to do. (Time equals money.) My daughter also attempted to find a fix for the issue. She discovered numerous viruses on my website, so she deleted those. And she and I together decided to move my site to a new web host, since axspace has been unresponsive to my requests for help, and to get away from WordPress since there is a problem there with the viruses and whatnot.

We opted to go with Web Hosting Hub as my daughter has her site there and has been happy with them. They will hold my domain name and host my site. I went with a 3 year contract including off-site backup for my website, which I don't currently have and have now seen first hand why it is very important. The first problem that arose is I can't select my current domain name since I already have it elsewhere. I don't want the existing site to go off-line while I am building the new site. (The existing site looks fine, I just can't log in to it.) We chose the name provenancepublishing.com, which is my publishing company name.

The second problem concerns the template of the existing site, which I love. Because it was a WordPress template, I can't just pick it up and move it to the new website. My daughter went back to college today, leaving me with the instruction to select a template from the Web Hosting Hub samples. I just don't really like any of them as much as the one I already have. When I went to look at my existing site today for a comparison, I decided to try logging in one more time. Believe it or not, I was able to log in! I don't know if it was coincidence or the fact that the viruses were removed or what, but color me happy!

So, what do I do with the new service I paid for? Do I still move the myhousehistory site over to it just to be safe? Do I add a backup service to the WordPress site and leave it where it is? Do I use the new site just for Provenance Publishing so that I can sell any additional books through that website? Stay tuned...