I admit it. I sucked, and I failed big.

It’s hard to accept the fact that someone like me who is a preacher of backing up data lost  collectively more than a hundred posts. It’s one of the niche site where I am the administrator. The owner of the site just shook his head in an unbelief. I explained to him what happened and I’m not blaming anybody but me. We cannot sue the web host provider because it’s on their terms and conditions that they are not obligated to backup the data. We cannot request even just a partial backup from them because they too lost everything.

Let’s me state the hard fact, it is our responsibility as an admin or blogger to backup our own blog! Don’t rely on our web host provider.

But, just like what the title of my post today, I was able to recover everything (fyi: I’m still recovering more) even though I don’t have an online backup nor a full backup. I have a WordPress XML backup but it’s more than 1-year old already. It’s stale backup, not updated. I even looked on my other hard disks, but my search resulted to nothing.

I’ve tried using Google’s “cache:url” but it did not yield to a good result. It only cached the previous month. By the way, this Google tool of “cache:ur” is a one way to make sure that Google is really crawling and indexing your site. Try it, and see how Google takes a snapshot of your blog and pages. Here’s an example on how to use: simply type “cache:www.yourdomainname.com“ on Google search page (without the quote and replace the yourdomainname.com with your own domain name).

Since it didn’t quite work well with Google, the magic tool that showed up the missing post is Wayback Machine or www.archive.org. It’s a virtual time machine where you can browse your site –your missing site that is. Unlike Google, Wayback Machine includes most images in their archive!  This internet archiving machine started in 1996 and was opened to the public in 2001. Currently, it includes more than a 100 terabytes of date and has an archived of more than 150 billion pages.  You can check any web pages from 1996 up to yesterday. Try it, and see how does your site or blog looks like yesterday or a year ago. If you are lucky, you can even see your old theme.  Just type in the web site that you are looking for and make sure that you know the exact URL to be able to see the archive.

I’m forever grateful to this unsung modern hero – Wayback Machine – for  recovering not only the  missing blog  but rescuing  myself as well from humiliation. The owner of the niche site is already smiling when he saw his site has been recovered. He was mesmerized and have no idea how I did it.

Have you lost your posts in the past, not knowing where to get your backup? Now you know where to find it, even if you don’t have a physical backup in your hard drive.

I was having dinner with my wife together with my father in a now popular restaurant that offers Unlimited Rice. For those of who you who are in the Philippines, I’m pretty sure that you are familiar with this restaurant.

Anyway, I was already half-way through eating my juicy barbecue chicken when my wife reminded me that she ordered the unlimited rice menu for me. I told her that I can only finish 1 cup of rice because I seldom eat a lot during dinner. This got me thinking, that this restaurant became very popular because of their “unlimited rice” promo but in reality, an average can person can eat only maybe  2-3 cups of rice and perhaps it’s already included in the price. So there’s really no such unlimited rice because you’re stomach can only take as much and soon it will be full.

This is also the same with web hosting.

No Unlimited Web Host Disk Space and Bandwidth Usage

Are you really 100% sure that your web host provider can offer you unlimited hosting space and unlimited bandwidth?

Hmm… I know that some of you are thinking, “Yes, I’ve read on the front page of my web host provider that they can provide unlimited host space and bandwidth.” I can even hear some of you saying, ” I saw on the web host features that says – “Unlimited Disk Space” and “Unlimited Bandwidth” .”

Are you really sure? I mean, have you read it properly? Or do you need eye prescription because you can’t read it correctly?

I assure you that there’s no such “Unlimited.”  NO web host provider can give you that. Don’t take my word for it. Come on, I dare you to prove to me that indeed your web host provider can give you unlimited space and bandwidth.

Most if not all web hosting providers does not set arbitrary limits on the  amount of data stored (files) and traffic (or bandwidth) but in reality they are monitoring your site for excess usage. One of the web host that I reviewed can offer you 100,000 inodes only ( 1 file = 1 inode) and another very popular blog host provider offers up to 200,000. Beyond this threshold, they can suspend your blog or website without warning. Some will give you 2 days to fix the problem before they will take an action such as making your site disappear in thin air.

Your blog or website is also candidate for suspension if you constantly deleting large number of files in a regular basis.

For normal usage, you should not be worried on this but you have to take note on what does “unlimited” really means for each web host provider.

And, did you know that even if you are using VPS and Dedicates servers, you are still not allowed to have “unlimited disk space and bandwidth?”

Today is National’ Heroes Day in the Philippines. It commemorates the celebration of the national heroes. This day falls every last Monday of August. The president of the land usually declares this day as a non-working – meaning it’s a vacation day!

Unfortunately, I was not able to take advantage on this so-called vacation day. I was asked to report in our office. To make it fair to everybody, we were all called to report including our bosses.

We are actually fast tracking the re-launching of our new system. Sorry, I can’t divulge it yet for now but it has to something to do with short messaging system and email services.

Being the most senior software consultant of the company, our president gave me the tasked to look for a solution on how are we going to upgrade the servers of our systems.

Currently, our servers are located on two separate providers. Our main server is colocated here in the Philippines and the other server is in Europe since most of our clients are there. We have a 1/2 half rack colocation space which we are renting out in Manila while our server in Netherlands is being managed by other people.

During our informal discussion, I recommended that we need to look for another web hosting provider so we can have additional backup for our projects.

By the way, our system is currently processing 600,000 emails per month. We are projecting that this will past the 1 million mark in two months time. Ever since we started our company (yes, I’m one pioneers), we already decided that all our servers must be managed by an enterprise level service providers. Having a managed hosting setup like this, we can concentrate in developing our projects instead of worrying about the network infrastructure.

It’s already midnight here and yet I’m still busy looking and searching for another provider, most probably based in Canada or USA because we have plans to expand our business in North America. I’m not the hero type person but my boss told me that I need to submit my report tomorrow at 3PM during our meeting or else we can’t get a bonus for our project,

Whew! Time flies so fast! I had a great time in Hong Kong with my family and my in-laws.  There were 14 of us in all. My kids really enjoyed the vacation so much that they don’t want to go home anymore. My 4-year old son even wants to stay in Ocean Park and live there forever!

The vacation was a blast. Every minute I spent with my wife and kids was unforgettable. I will forever cherish the bonding time and activities we shared together. My wife told me that I was even more “childlike” than my kids specially when we were in Hong Kong Disneyland.  I was even singing the song “It’s a small world” when we were inside the pink  castle on Fantasy Land.

My sister-in-law also noticed that I can’t control myself in grabbing those virtual goodies while we were watching Donald Duck and friends on Mickey’s Phillar Magic 3-D show.

Oh well, I admit that I was! I enjoyed everything inside the Disneyland including the parade of Disney’s character and was even more gamely in getting wet.

Too bad our 4 days of vacation had to end but the memories of course will stay in my hear forever.

Sorry for this too personal post of mine. I’m still in euphoric mood. I totally shut-off myself from the “online world”  during our vacation. I did not check my emails nor log on to the internet. I even switched off my mobile phone.

So no technical blog post for me today or maybe  just an update because I received two great emails this morning which I want to share with you.

First is the FREE DOMAIN Name Registration of 1and1 Internet is extended until the end of this month of June 2010. You may want to check my previous post about it or you can go directly to 1and1 internet website and grab your new domain.

The second email was about the new FREE ebook from the ever famous  mogul  blogger JohnChow.  The Book isn’t going to cost you anything because  he’s giving it away for free. You may download The Ultimate Blog Profit Model here.  I actually read it in just one sitting  this afternoon and it’s awesome. It details the business model that John used to enable his blog to make over $500,000 last year. I think you will really enjoying read it as well.

That’s all for today. I still have a lot of pictures to upload on my Facebook

that's me , wearing a red anime shirt with my new hairdo!

If you noticed the title of my post ” Hosting your OWN Blog”, I capitalized the word “OWN”.

Let me clarify this, the word “OWN” doesn’t mean buying your own hardware and setup your own web hosting in your house.  What I mean is, if you seriously want to be a blogger (read: make money online) forget about using free hosting service such as blogspot or wordpress. I’m not against bloggers using free blog hosting, I’m also using blogspot in one of my internet marketing.

While free hosting services are great, it doesn’t give you a professional image if you can’t even spend a few pennies. Some pay-per-post providers will not even allow blogs on subdomains. So it pays to have your domain hosted on a paid and reliable web hosting provider.

To be honest, there are a lot of cheap but reliable hosting nowadays there really is no excuse anymore of not hosting your own blog.  I have written a lot of  reviews on various web host provider already. Check them out.

As I’ve recommended before, if you don’t like my personal reviews, you can always check some independent  reviews of the best services out there. Or if you prefer, just “ask Mr. G”-  search google- on what company is providing the best service, but I warn you that not every replies of Mr. G are the most reliable.  Ask for a second opinion, search forums, ask your fellow blogger. If you’re a non-techie, person,  ask your younger siblings or friends who are more adept to new technologies.

There are hundreds of web hosting providers waiting for you out there. Seek them and they will be found