Moment of panic

That moment of panic when you realise there’s a problem with your website/blog. When your phone can’t connect to the server to download your emails, and the following seconds (it feels longer at the time) it takes to exit email and type your web address in to see if it’s you or the server. You know that feeling? Yeah, thought so.

I had this yesterday. No email, so check the URL. Blog not loading, showing a ‘cannot connect to server’ error. Nothing mentioned on the hosting company’s status page so fired off a support ticket. An hour later the report is all good, but it took another hour or two before DNS and networks caught up with the changes. Thanks to Reclaim Hosting for their prompt action! While it doesn’t sound much, ‘an hour or two later’, it does feel a while lot longer than that at the time. Like waiting at the doctors for an appointment, or a late running plumber, time when you need something quickly/urgently, seems to run so much slower.

And of course, it’s not as simple as this. It never is. I had a half-written postI was editing and wanted to add one more thing before publishing. Changes hand’t been saved to the server and I daren’t restart my machine or browser to see if the problem was my laptop. Arghh. A quick cut-and-paste to Word to preserve the content and I made sure I didn’t exit the browser either, just in case.

The worst instance of this was when I was waiting for my interview for the University of Leicester, in 2012, when I found my website not working and had actually been pulled from the server for violating the hosting companies rules. I spent a frantic 30 minutes exchanging emails in trying to get it back and working before the interview, by removing various plugins and promosing to do more when I had more time later that day.

Nothing causes more fear than a page or server error when you need your website most.

Image source: Alan Levine (CC BY 2.0)