Blogging Hurts Blogging

I can say with some confidence that I’m actually back on my blog, returned from the blogging nightmare of the past month.

When my blog began crashing on its shared server due to too much memory, I had to deal with surly and unhelpful tech support, I switched to a VPS account, which I was told by the shared host that I needed. I decided to go through a different company for my shared hosting as I was unimpressed with the service I received (no real help in diagnosing the issue, just an attempt to upsell me to their VPS service at $50 a mont.)

So for $25 a month, I was on a VPS on another service, and again I found my blog crashing the VPS several times a day. I troubleshot the situation as best I could. I actually went into my MySQL database and found that I had one table that was taking up 2/3 of my database that only contained 404 errors. I emptied the entries out and this cut the size of my database from 75 MB to 25 MB. Still didn’t work. I optimized, repaired my database did everything I could. Turned off plugins, turned on plugins, nothing seemed to help.

Then I decided to upgrade my PHP server, which I’d need to do through Apache. The upgrade went awry, the result of which was that I was informed that I needed to have my Apache Server rebuilt, which Tech. Support would gladly do–for $60 an hour.

It was then I found out that PHP version was my most likely problem. My old host had PHP version 5, the new VPS has PHP version 4 installed. This explains all the PHP errors coming from my database.

It has been an annoying couple weeks. So much of what I do and what I’m trying to do in making my way through life is dependent on functional software. I need to work on a promotional plan for Laser and Sword Magazine, but the past few weeks, I’ve had to fight just to have a blog up and running. Hopefully, we can get caught up over the weekend.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’ll be returning to a VPS any time soon. Successfully managing it is above my technical level. If I worked at it, I could learn, but really all I want to do is blog. It’s good to be back (finally, I hope.)