Most of you probably noticed that AsWeTravel has been offline a lot during the past 4-5 days, and we really apologize for that!
It might look as though it happened all of the sudden, but the truth is that the site has been dying a very slow and painful death during the past six months, something we’ve kind of been ignoring – until this week when sh*t finally hit the fan.
It started a while ago with the site going from very slow (throttling – they called it) to crashing entirely for a few minutes every now and then until it saved itself and got back online.
We did a few things to correct it, changed the host, changed the theme, changed, changed and tried to optimize the website – and throughout the entire time every expert we contacted simply told us that there was no reason why that should be happening and seemed just as confused as we were … no matter what we did, nothing seemed to help.
We simply got used to having a site crashing every week, but since it was only for a couple of minutes each time, and with us traveling all the time – we never put enough effort into trying to fix the problem.
And then, this week – AsWeTravel finally just gave in and died – it crashed over and over again & refused to breathe!
here we are trying to pretend nothing is wrong with AWT – feeling better with a fruit smoothie in CM … :p
As we post this article today the site has been online for just over 48hrs without ANY problems – so fingers crossed it stays this way!
We had to install our site from the ground up and doing that with 2.5 years of content isn’t an easy task :p
We’ve done some major changes now, are taking every step from here very carefully, and hopefully we’ve managed to make sure that these problems don’t happen again - however we will continue to monitor the site for these issues to make sure it stays online.
Not the perfect way to spend our final week in beautiful Thailand, but hey … :p
Wow, what a nightmare! Glad to see it’s back up and working. I keep waiting for something like that to happen to us. Good to know you can come back from Hell.
Thanks nikki, so far it’s been working fine so hopefully we’re back for good
Yep, this is the crappy side of blogging. Hate to hear that this happened and hope you are stable now. Not a way to spend a week in Thailand. I think stuff like this is far more frustrating than problems you encounter while traveling.
I agree, it is worse than anything you encounter while traveling, because it goes on for so freaking long and you feel like you can’t control it at all.
Yikes! Sorry you had to go through that. I went through the same thing a few months back — had been on BlueHost for awhile with no problems, then throttling hit HARD. Chris R saved me and moved everything to MediaTemple. Not a single hiccup since then. Would recommend both MediaTemple and Chris.
Hey Kate – yeah it sucks – we moved to hostgator and got a VPS account with them a few months back, since we had those throttling problems with bluehost – but nothing really changed and have hated the customer service at hostgator (they know nothing) so right now we are looking for a new host – I am looking into MediaTemple, which set-up are you using with them? yup – Chris does know his stuff, have been chatting to him as well
We’ll fix it
In fact, I think we just did
Thanks for all the help Jon, we both really appreciate it.
Oh man I’ve been there… except not with as much content… but I also said screw it for a while haha. Not getting in the way of my good time!
I know how you feel, when there are no problems you feel invincible, but when there are, you feel so helpless. It’s even more crazy to think these sites we work so hard on and spend so much time on in fact don’t exist in a physical sense. There is nothing tangible. Sorry for getting trippy but I just try and keep myself in check by thinking that when I get frustrated with my site
I had so many tech challenges moving my site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org with several months of material, I can only imagine how awful it’s been with 2.5 years of material! Glad that so far so good, thinking happy thoughts, hopefully it stay that way.
Not fun to hear about your site problems, I’m glad to hear your site is working again and hope it stays this way. If you ever want to change web host again, I can highly recommend DreamHost. Very affordable and great customer service!
Ugh.. So sorry to hear of your website troubles! Those are the worst. I hope it wasn’t too stressful. I freak out when the site goes down, but luckily I have a techie boyfriend to fix it for us.
jesus!!! Well recovered, guys – I would’ve had a nervous breakdown!