This post is part of the "First Few Old Blog Posts" archive.
You could expect a certain lack of coherency/maturity from these posts.
Alright , let's narrate the whole event from my point of view.
Last week , during the evening , I desired to check on the Abstergo Project hosted on my website. To my surprise , I was redirected instead to some other advertisement page. Confused , I then tried the direct URL for my website. The same thing happened again. Furious , I logged in to my host's CPanel , and found out that my account was suspended.
I rewarded myself with a big giant Facepalm. I realized what an utter idiot I had been.
My host was called 0fees. It was a free host and one of the best in it's business out there. I had previously hosted several websites on it's services and I had no problem trusting it to be reliable with my website too. I trusted it so much to the point that I had kept no backups at all of my site. In fact , anything that was to be backed up , was put up on my website. And now , I realized how stupid I had acted. That day , I remembered a big lesson I had learnt in my childhood.
Never trust anything that's free. (Except Google)
So now I was stuck without a website. All my files were lost. All my database entries were gone. Why was my account suspended? Well it's obviously a marketing gimmick to get me to upgrade to paid hosting. I actually considered paying for the hosting just to recover my files back. But then I realized that the paid hosting would be on a different server , thus removing all hopes for a recovery.
The worse part is that my website meant a lot to me. Every line that I code , every line that I write on the internet , every account that I make somewhere , can be traced from my website. I use my website to organize myself. So that I can keep track of every contribution I make to the internet. This is especially required due to the fact that I have OCD. I have to sort every of my actions else I feel that all my work is useless. I have to remind myself that I have a blog , I have a twitter , I've made my own quotes etc to realize that I have done something atleast. The worse problem an organized person can face is losing his organizer. And I had lost my website.
At once , I began to rewrite my website. It was of course , a hard job. I was aided by Google's webcache and I could recover the text content in my website. But all the resources were lost and I had to make them from scratch. Luckily , I had a backup of a few of my bigger projects thus they could also be restored. Once I was done , came the question of where I would host the website now. I first considered turning my home desktop into a server since it was switched on for 20 hours a day anyway. Then I remembered of my good friend , JamezQ. He owned a server with above 99% uptime. I had hosted small Java projects on it many times and it worked great. But I was hesitant in asking to host my entire website on it. As it turned out , he was glad to have my website on his server. And so , I uploaded all my files , configured the MySQL databases , and restored the subdomains. But even then , a few projects could not be restored as I had kept the backups on my laptop which I do not have right now.
So , yeah. There you go , my website is back with a new look. There's new content and a better interface.
Check it out at http://enkrypt.in
Also , while making the website , I took to myself for making some entertaining error pages.
400 - Bad Request http://enkrypt.in/400.htm
401 - Authorization Required http://enkrypt.in/401.htm
403 - Forbidden http://enkrypt.in/403.htm
404 - Not found http://enkrypt.in/404.htm
500 - Internal Server Error http://enkrypt.in/500.htm
You could expect a certain lack of coherency/maturity from these posts.
Alright , let's narrate the whole event from my point of view.
Last week , during the evening , I desired to check on the Abstergo Project hosted on my website. To my surprise , I was redirected instead to some other advertisement page. Confused , I then tried the direct URL for my website. The same thing happened again. Furious , I logged in to my host's CPanel , and found out that my account was suspended.
I rewarded myself with a big giant Facepalm. I realized what an utter idiot I had been.
My host was called 0fees. It was a free host and one of the best in it's business out there. I had previously hosted several websites on it's services and I had no problem trusting it to be reliable with my website too. I trusted it so much to the point that I had kept no backups at all of my site. In fact , anything that was to be backed up , was put up on my website. And now , I realized how stupid I had acted. That day , I remembered a big lesson I had learnt in my childhood.
Never trust anything that's free. (Except Google)
So now I was stuck without a website. All my files were lost. All my database entries were gone. Why was my account suspended? Well it's obviously a marketing gimmick to get me to upgrade to paid hosting. I actually considered paying for the hosting just to recover my files back. But then I realized that the paid hosting would be on a different server , thus removing all hopes for a recovery.
The worse part is that my website meant a lot to me. Every line that I code , every line that I write on the internet , every account that I make somewhere , can be traced from my website. I use my website to organize myself. So that I can keep track of every contribution I make to the internet. This is especially required due to the fact that I have OCD. I have to sort every of my actions else I feel that all my work is useless. I have to remind myself that I have a blog , I have a twitter , I've made my own quotes etc to realize that I have done something atleast. The worse problem an organized person can face is losing his organizer. And I had lost my website.
At once , I began to rewrite my website. It was of course , a hard job. I was aided by Google's webcache and I could recover the text content in my website. But all the resources were lost and I had to make them from scratch. Luckily , I had a backup of a few of my bigger projects thus they could also be restored. Once I was done , came the question of where I would host the website now. I first considered turning my home desktop into a server since it was switched on for 20 hours a day anyway. Then I remembered of my good friend , JamezQ. He owned a server with above 99% uptime. I had hosted small Java projects on it many times and it worked great. But I was hesitant in asking to host my entire website on it. As it turned out , he was glad to have my website on his server. And so , I uploaded all my files , configured the MySQL databases , and restored the subdomains. But even then , a few projects could not be restored as I had kept the backups on my laptop which I do not have right now.
So , yeah. There you go , my website is back with a new look. There's new content and a better interface.
Check it out at http://enkrypt.in
Also , while making the website , I took to myself for making some entertaining error pages.
400 - Bad Request http://enkrypt.in/400.htm
401 - Authorization Required http://enkrypt.in/401.htm
403 - Forbidden http://enkrypt.in/403.htm
404 - Not found http://enkrypt.in/404.htm
500 - Internal Server Error http://enkrypt.in/500.htm
While I largely agree that you can trust Google in most cases, I wouldn't say that you should trust them outright.
ReplyDeleteI had an incident recently that was somewhat of an eye-opener. It's not necessarily Google's fault, except that they built the software in a way that allowed it to happen.
On Google Plus I re-shared TONS AND TONS of content from various profiles, but none of them as often as I did the Atheism page. It would seem that almost half of the content on my G+ page was content that was re-shared from this Atheism page.
Well something happened and that page disappeared. I think it got removed for some reason because they were posting like normal one morning and then mysteriously the page vanished completely from Google Plus. For the last year I assumed a re-share was exactly that a "re-sharing" of the content; I thought the image I was re-sharing was now part of my profile. I was wrong and now almost half of my G+ posts are black with an exclamation point triangle in the middle.
Needless to say, I will no longer be simply trusting all of Google's services to host all the content I care about.