Disaster Story: Alan’s Messages

WordPress backups and support

The website Alan’s Messages came to us looking for support for wordpress after their website crashed while running on the inmotion hosting server. Further information about this can be found on our recent blog post about the disaster at Inmotion Hosting in early 2017.

Our first step was to look for a recent back up of the WordPress website. However, there was no automated back up solution in place, nor were there any manual back ups completed and saved to the server. As well, the client had never been given a copy of their websites database and files. So at this point, we knew no back up existed within the clients access.

Our next step was to go to the hosting company. Unfortunately, inmotion does a daily back up only and the crash had happened a few days earlier, so their back ups had been overwritten by corrupted back ups. Again, another dead end.

At this point, we were starting to worry that this website may be lost forever. This was a huge blow to the client, because the website was the result of seven years effort and a great deal of financial input. For the website to just disappear is hard to grasp, but this is a reality if no backups are created.

Clutching at straws, we thought we’d see if the client had any other web developers work on the website in the last year. The response was that Fiver had done a small job on his site 6 months earlier. We managed to track down the developer and, lo and behold, he had a copy of the database!

We uploaded the new copy of the database to the site, it had issues and took about ten hours of work to get it working with the new version of the website, but in the end, it worked!!!

This was a hugely lucky end result and we couldn’t be happier.

This story is a great example of why WordPress website back ups and good quality WordPress Support are so important!

www.alansmessages.com is now on our Essential WordPress Maintenance Plan and is being backed up daily to three different amazon s3 servers for the ultimate in back up security.

Our final steps were to move the website off of Inmotion Hosting and over to our hosting with our partners, Flywheel. Once there we also set up SSL to meet Google’s new best practices.