breebop.com

I’ve been over six months on hiatus, and have lost all my blog archives because someone with my hosting provider, Bluehost, appears to have forgotten to flip a switch.

All the ‘CPU Exceeded’ error messages everyone’s seen for the last six months or so have been a technician’s mistake. Apparently the error was resolved back in January, but the block was never removed from my account, so I thought the various fixes I’d tried were ineffective. After several fruitless attempts to communicate with the Bluehost ‘help’ folks in which they told me again and again to ‘check my scripts’ I uninstalled WordPress in a desperate hope that it might fix the problem. The error messages persisted, and by this point, I was having a baby and was otherwise occupied.

Baby’s now two months old, and I finally had a moment to contact Bluehost tech support again and ask them to look into the issue. After a few exchanges (during which they told me to check my scripts, and in which I told them I had no more scripts to check!), I finally got this message back:

I am sorry that the error never came off. I am ahving a L3 remove the accoutn suspended error. [sic]

Bluehost can’t do anything to replace the years of blogging purged in this mess, but I am hoping they’ll at least have the decency to compensate me for the last six months of downtime. I registered several domain names through them, as well as paying for a fairly hefty hosting package, which have all been blocked since January.

All I can say is beware of Bluehost. If you’re thinking of signing with them, forget it. There are so many providers out there, you don’t need to risk trouble with one that has already demonstrated incompetence. And back up your archives. I always meant to but never got around to it. I tried to once the CPU errors began, but it was too late - the error page that blocked my main site also blocked my access to the WordPress admin panel and I was unable to initiate a backup.