For some reason my blog has been having trouble loading for the last day or so. I raised a support incident with SiteGround (my website host) who replied that it was probably a networking issue from where I was in sunny old England (ignoring the fact that peeps from America and Russia were unable to view it either).

A bit of investigation narrowed it down to it being a problem with the mySQL database for WordPress. It seemed to be just that database since I have a couple of others (MPQArchive and Gallery 2) and they were working fine. I tried to get at it via various routes (cPanel and phpMyAdmin) but no luck, they all kept timing out (web based access is such a crap idea, I’d like to use the mySQL command prompt to connect to it remotely and manage it that way).

But anyway, I decided the best thing to do would be back it up, nuke it, recreate it and then re-import the data. Obviously I couldn’t do that and my existing backup was a month out of date, so I emailed the support desk again to ask them to back it up for me (I was polite and everything) and they oh so helpfully pointed me to this page:

$20 to back up a fecking database?!?! As it turns out I went and tried the site again and it miraculously came back up… I’m still none the wiser as to what caused the problem and what fixed it but I’m definitely going to look into running a regular cron job to automagically back up and email me the various databases since SiteGround were pretty useless.

I suppose that’s the reason the hosting is so cheap, for anything other than routine problems they’ll charge you for it. Which really, is no different from having to ring premium rate phone numbers for tech support. Sigh! (You don’t get something for nothing).