It’s the second time it’s happened to me. The site crashes beyond all repair. The first time was a theme I build myself that crashed repeatedly. It would put me into an infinite loop logging in, and WordPress support sites had literally dozens of causes, none of which I could fix in a short amount of time. This latest crash happened when I renewed tshottle.com, and GoDaddy’s server forgot how to map to it. (I know. I need to ditch GoDaddy and go https for free somewhere else. It’s on the agenda.) Once again, a manual backup did not work. Not even exporting my backend database, which is relatively simple.
So I trashed the old server I’d had since about 2007 and upgraded to a new Linux server with a better CPanel option. Gone are the 3 AM emails from JetPack telling me my site was down for five minutes.
So what am I doing to prevent all this?
Right now, I’m doing a manual backup on the weekend, namely exporting a copy of the database and copying down the pertinent WordPress folders. Images will be a challenge because, for whatever reason, WordPress inserts pictures with absolute paths to the file, not relative ones where it doesn’t care if you’re here, somewhere on a Google site, or even ashley-madison.com.* Soon, I will have a Vault Backup through JetPack, which lets me switch servers at will.
I need the https conversion because 1.) Google favors secure web sites, and 2.) it’s just safer that way when you visit. Besides, if I plan to build WordPress sites for other people, I need to be better about taking care of my own site.
*Yes, I’m aware I just sent you to haveibeenpwned.com, which can track whether you’ve been caught in a data breach. Why’d you click on a defunct adultery dating site, you pervert?