How I lost all my Google traffic because I didn’t back up my site

Posted on October 1, 2007 at 12:06 pm

I just experienced a blogger’s worst nightmare: My hosting company’s server crashed, most of the data was LOST, my site was down for two full days, and I lost all of my traffic! And on top of that all, I was not even in town when this happened, so I could not fix the problem till I got back home because I didn’t have any remote backups. So after blogging for 6 months and increasing my traffic slowly but steadily to almost 1200 visitors a day, I am now getting a whopping 45 visitors from Google!

Google is amazingly fast at removing a site from it’s main index if something is wrong and here’s proof below:

So as you can see from the graph, I was well above 1,000 visitors a day until September 28th and beyond. From what I found out from my hosting company, BlueHost, the server had a "severe" hardware failure late in the evening on Friday, the 28th. Unfortunately, even with all of their backup systems, etc, they "lost" some of the backups and the others were corrupted! Now remember, you’re talking about a HOSTING company and a fairly popular one also that LOST their backups.

And that’s just Google traffic, I also lost all of my Yahoo traffic, StumbleUpon traffic, and more than half of my FeedBurner subscribers! All it takes it one mistake like this to screw up everything!

I had a backup of my SQL database, so I had all of my posts saved, but I didn’t have a complete backup of my actual home directory on the server. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones that had only a few corrupted files and didn’t lose everything. The files that got corrupted were all of the index.php files stored in various locations in the Wordpress directories. I was able to download the latest version of WordPress, replace all of the old files along with the corrupted ones and everything was back online.

HOWEVER, had all of my data been lost, I only had backups of my Wordpress theme and a couple of the system folders like wp-admin and wp-includes. I would have lost all of my pictures and plug-ins stored in the wp-contents folder. I basically got superbly LUCKY and this was a big wake up call for me. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening to you, but it does and if you’re not prepared, all of your hard work (and income) could disappear within a few hours!!!

Here are my new mantra’s that I’ll be following from now on:

MAKE BACKUPS OF ALL DATA ON MY WEB SITE DAILY

STORE THE BACKUPS LOCALLY, ON MY HOSTING COMPANY’S SERVERS, AND REMOTELY USING ANOTHER SERVICE

ASSUME IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME AGAIN

As of now, my site has been up and running since yesterday and I’m still not getting any traffic from Google. Hopefully, things will come back once they see that the site does not simply have the words "This site is temporarily down due to required repairs" written all over it! I’m praying!

Anyone else have this kind of experience? If so, post a comment about what happened and if you recovered or not! Thanks!

[tags]lost google traffic, blog backup, lose traffic, backup your blog, de-indexed[/tags]

» Filed Under Blogging

Comments

9 Responses to “How I lost all my Google traffic because I didn’t back up my site”

Sameer said on : October 1st, 2007 at 4:47 pm

Talk about Murphy’s law. I was wondering what happened! Glad you are back online.

Assuming you had a remote backup of the entire blog with the database, and your primary server crashed, can all the files be restored automatically without human intervention?

Or is it that one has to always manually restore/upload the files via local or remote backups? In this case if someone is on vacation for 3-4 days and does NOT check on their blog, the backup would not be restored and traffic still be lost, regardless if you have a backup or not.

“Automatic restore and synchronize”.. is there anything like that for web sites or blogs?

I hope I make sense.

akishore said on : October 1st, 2007 at 5:23 pm

Hey Sameer,

I’m glad to be back too! hahaha That was quite scary indeed. To answer your question about automatic recovery or restoration of backups, the answer right now is yes and no. In my case, the backups were actually corrupt, so I still had to manually upload and replace files.

Had the files not been corrupt, they actually did restore my files to the original directory, so my site would be been up and running just fine. I’m sure that most large hosting companies will try to automatically restore your site in case of a failure. But as you can see, it’s good to have your own backup because you can’t count on them sometimes!

Siddharth said on : October 1st, 2007 at 9:33 pm

I host on a free host my site due to lack of money.They are really nice but when they are down they take a lot of time to recover.

My site,http://technoworld.uni.cc, is down from 23rd of October and is currently down now also as you might have experienced.
Google got my site on 2nd no when i searched for technoworld but now I cant see it even on the 3rd page
I used to have the most search traffic from the query technoworld
:’(

I never had huge traffic like urs ,normally 150 page views a day 50 subscribers .

But but , I am so sad cant say nything.I am consoling my father to have a paid host, he agrees but we dont have credit card.
So problems and problems and problems , that too when I was getting popular as I got 2 of my articles in lifehacker and 1 in downloadsquad and was starting to get comments (((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

yeah,But I had daily backups of posts and had all images backups plugins themes

Someone please help me!

going for a trip to dal housie.Will be back on 8th:-) hope to see my site also back by the time

P.S : I am getting jealous of you.I havent written nything from so many days and you can write on ur blog

Sydney said on : October 1st, 2007 at 11:53 pm

(I feel like I should knock on wood before replying, here…)

Glad to see you back up and running! I can only imagine the feeling when you found out. Recently my entire SQL database disappeared from my hosting service, only to reappear an hour later with their apologies. Fortunately I hadn’t launched my blog yet, so the information that [might have] been lost wasn’t detrimental. I now [try] to backup regularly.

You mentioned you use WordPress; I was curious as to whether you’ve installed the database backup plugin. Thus far it’s proven very useful for me. The plugin can be downloaded at http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

All in all though, glad you’re back. I’ve been reading your blog for a couple months now and always find it incredibly helpful!

akishore said on : October 2nd, 2007 at 12:23 am

Hi Siddarth,

Don’t be too worried, as long as they can get your site up and running within a few days, your traffic will come back. There are actually a lot of free hosting services out there that might be better than the one you’re currently using. I’ll try to send you some links!

Good luck and don’t be jealous! Your blog will do fine, everyone has to go through these rough times!

akishore said on : October 2nd, 2007 at 12:23 am

Hi Sydney, thanks for visiting my blog for such a long time! I’m glad you enjoy it! I was really about to kill myself if I had lost 6 months worth of work in one day!

Currently, I do have the wp-db-backup plugin installed and running. Unfortunately, as I came to find out, having just the posts backed up was not enough. Even with my database intact, some of my web files were corrupted (the PHP files) and all of the pictures would have been missing also!

Luckily, my blog traffic has returned to normal today, so that was fairly quick. I’m doing daily backups now!

Again, thanks for visiting!

mehdi said on : October 3rd, 2007 at 2:57 am

dear akishore i am very happy because you come back and your site problem ……

James said on : March 17th, 2008 at 1:51 pm

Does your present host have CPanel with automatic database backups? The odds are that the answer to this is “yes” if you ask about it.

If so, you can have those nightly backups gzipped and sent to an email address (suggestion: set up a Gmail account that only stores your database backups). I get daily backups of certain parts of my site just in case this horror story happens to me. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like more info on how to do this.