Well, that was definitely not the way I anticipated spending New Years.. nope, not at all.

It was 11:30 pm and I was at the OnlineNewYearsEve.com party when there was a knock at the door. Ok cool, a couple of our neighbors dropped in for a drink. So I put myself on away at the party, and went to have a drink with our friends. About 15 minutes later, I sat down at my puter again so I could get the January issue of the Wahm Business Magazine published when horror struck.

First I got XML errors, which was then replaced by a generic cPanel page congratulating me on having Apache installed and running (oh joy lol) and then the real nightmare – the dreaded Error 500 page.

Yep, my functioning website took a nosedive in less time than it takes to .. well .. (insert your imagination here).

Before total panic set in, I watched the ball drop with my hubby and son – yes, during all of this my 4 year old son was still bouncing all over the place. Then I hit the live chat support that my host offers, the same live chat that I’ve never had a problem with in the past… which last night became the live chat from hell. I tell you, the world was out to get me and the New Year was just minutes old!

*** ggggrrrr… I had this post all written out, then my browser crashed before it automatically saved any further than this point, so now I’m attempting to re-write it hahaha.. oh geez, let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come! ***

I’m experienced enough with website hosting to know that if I didn’t change any of my own settings that might cause the miserable Error 500 page, then something must have changed on the server. So there I was, just after the New Year began, waiting impatiently for the live chat operator for more time than I care to admit, even though I was #1 in the cue and it said my wait time should be 30 seconds (HA!). During my wait, I started checking into a few other areas and discovered that I could get into my cPanel ok, so I made a bee-line for the backups just in case I was going to be spending the rest of the night (aka morning) restoring my site. Then I discovered that my site’s admin area was totally messed up too, though at least it wasn’t giving me an Error 500.

Finally, I gave up on the 30 second wait time and logged into my hosting account to submit a critical ticket. Sure enough I was told that an announcement had been made that my host was upgrading to PHP5. Now, with every other service provider that I use, they have the courtesy of sending out an email to inform their customers of planned outages, upgrades etc. Apparently that’s not the case with these guys as I was ‘told’ the announcement was made in their forums. I guess I need to leave their forums open in my web browser 24/7 from now on just to make sure I don’t miss anything – geeez!

For the next 3 hours (yes.. until 4:00 am!), I was busy fixing the errors that my cPanel error log was showing, and finally I was able to get the both the site and the admin area back online. There were still a few quirks that I knew had to be fixed asap, but as my head was about to hit the keyboard, I decided those could wait until a little later in the morning. So I headed off to hit my couch – yes, couch, not bed.

The reason for that? At 3:00 am, my son decided he was done sleeping in his bed, and he curled up on his couch (the loveseat). Instead of shuffling him back into his room with a fight, I just wanted to close my peepers, so I let him be while I grabbed a pillow and blanket and made my bed on the couch. And I slept great too, until 5:00, when little monster decided that his Daddy should be the one on the couch and not me. It was only a few minutes later that he forgot the argument and fell asleep again… until 5:30 am, when he very politely asked for a drink and even used please and thank you. With manners like that, how could I refuse? Uuughhh. I know there was one more wake up call, but honestly I can’t remember what it was about now lol. Then at 10:30, hubby woke me up and sent me off to the bedroom, where I lied my head down on my favorite pillow, and realized my head was pounding.

It was about then that I finally gave up on sleep. So, I got up, popped a few tylenol, had a cup of peppermint tea and sat back down at my puter to finish the fixes. I got them done too! And so, WahmsUnited.com is now back online and the January issue of the Wahm Business Magazine has also been published for your viewing pleasure :)

Right now I’m sitting here chewing on a straw (better that then chocolate) because of the fact that as soon as my head hit my pillow at 4:00 am, I quit smoking. No, I didn’t throw out my cigarettes at the stroke of midnight, but I did dump my ashtray and chuck the rest of the pack in the garbage at 4. I feel almost certain that someone decided I needed an extra challenge right at the start of a brand New Year – and I think I survived the challenge however I’m really not happy about it LOL. April Fools Day is in April, not December/January ;)

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