Much to my dismay, I woke up yesterday to a horrifying situation that my site was down for almost 12 hours. To add to the remorse, for the past few days, I had been thinking of taking backups of my website content, mainly due to the lethal scars left from my past failures still weighing heavily on my brain. So, when the site wouldn’t load in the famed browsers I panicked and thought this was the end of it! My laxity had proved fatal and drowned me in immense pain and suffering yet again, I thought to myself. After all, this website has been my go-to place and a safe haven, for airing my views and opinions, for nearly 20 years.
Must say, yesterday’s was a rare occasion when the website wasn’t loading at all and I immediately counted a few possibilities. Technically, the website wouldn’t download if the server had crashed or had been hacked by overzealous techies — the latter seemed to be a rare possibility considering Bluehost’s market reputation, even being highly recommended by WordPress.org, though one could never stay so confident, then, by all means, I’d have lost access to the dashboard. And frankly, unless if I had left a security loophole in the platform or a plugin unattended by not installing the updates it’d be hard to blame the hosting service. Fearing the worst I attempted to log in, and to my delight, I realized that the dashboard was truly accessible. In short, it meant the server was in pristine health and most crucially, my content was safe. Through my observations, I clearly understood it was a technical matter which could only be handled by the technical staff of Bluehost, so I got on a live chat with one of them.
Here’s where I believe Bluehost could improve its reputation of being a world-class WordPress platform further by serving its customers expeditiously, the response time of its technical support is sluggish and excruciatingly long. To give an instance, I spent half of my productive day juggling between work and household until a resolution could be found. For instance, it was a fairly simple issue at the beginning which got much complex, but I wouldn’t get any reply from the other end, or the representative would keep me on hold for “3-5 minutes” and disappear, which would be annoying. After spending more than 2 hours with the member of the technical staff I had to leave the chat because there were other things begging for my attention on my to-do list. As I was later informed, everything boiled down to a disused Lightbox plugin which the representative promptly deleted on my request. On a side-note, that’s the biggest advantage and a native problem with WordPress plugins that inserts code at places you may not be aware as a non-programmer, that breaks the website apart. But the Bluehost representative did something else which I had no clue until I discovered that the site wouldn’t come online even after 2-3 hours.
So I initiated another round of live chat with the second representative of the technical support staff. I remembered during the process of resolving the site downtime with the first staff member, he had mentioned something about the quantity of .htaccess files in my public_html folder and I was left amazed. Since the first representative had pointed at the presence of multiple .htaccess files, in my enthusiasm to see my website up and running again, I asked him to permanently delete the files which were not necessary by exercising utmost caution. After all, a technical support staff representing Bluehost would commit no mistake, right? No, I was wrong. He deleted a critical .htaccess file that complicated the matter further! Moving on, the second technical representative was quick in his response time and in resolving the matter, and he asked me to check the website by throwing in some URLs. Also, his response time was prompt and did not make me wait. Now everything looked fine with the website, but somehow, there was an issue with the permalinks which continued to redirect to the WordPress folder installation. I was not willing to make this compromise but given the delay in resolving the matter, I had little choice. Understandably, I could resolve the permalinks issue later once I the website went online which was a top priority for me. However, to my shocking surprise, the website went offline the moment I closed the live chat window!
Time was of the essence here and I was getting desperate to get my site online. Believe it or not, I initiated my third conversation of the day with another technical staff at Bluehost and you can imagine the level of frustration and anxiety that was now brewing inside me. More so, because a seemingly simple issue was unnecessarily complicated by a qualified engineer when he deleted a crucial .htaccess file and adding to that issue, the long response times I experienced with the staff that tested my already running low-levels of patience. During my penultimate conversation with the third engineer, I mentioned about the .htaccess file and shared my hunch that he might have “unwittingly” deleted it from the server folder. I was obviously right, said the technical support engineer, and that instantly brought a smile on my face, the first sign of happiness on a dreary day. Finally, there was the hope of a long-term resolution now. I requested the staff member to restore the missing file while I did some work in the background through the dashboard to ensure the website was back online immaculately and not in a broken state.
I have to confess. Quite admittedly, this episode was hard on me and depressing if you consider that I had no role to play in the breakdown of my online estate. Yesterday was notable for many things. Somewhere, trust was shattered, some beliefs were compromised, and hope was crushed and eventually restored by the very people who compromised it. Overall, patience and calm win the toughest battles! That was the biggest positive takeaway from the experience.
