I honestly don’t remember if this is the second or third time that I have had to start a blog over again. I know it is AT LEAST the second time.

I lost one because it had been privately hosted until one day it wasn’t.  You see, for about 4 years there was someone I knew through the blogging community who had hosted my website. Which was lovely because hosting is expensive and cash flow is somewhat of an ongoing issue.  So, to score free hosting was huge. I didn’t know a lot about the person who was doing the hosting, but I considered them a friend.

Then, one morning I tried to get to my blog and got an error. I couldn’t log into my CPanel, either.  I reached out to the friend who had been providing my hosting.  Never heard back from them. So, even though I eventually procured hosting (which at this point wasn’t JUST for my blog, my professional website had been hosted through them, as well) I had no way to access ANY of the content from either site. Years of blog posts – GONE.  To this day I have no idea WHY the sudden end to the hosting and to the friendship.  Maybe it was just another one of those times when I felt someone was a friend and found out (very painfully) otherwise.

So, I started over again. And had several years of blog posts. And then there was an issue. I contacted the hosting company and told it wasn’t an issue on their end and that I’d need to completely reinstall WordPress. Which I did.  Went to restore from my backup and found that the file hadn’t saved correctly. Couldn’t even reinstall WordPress. After 3 days hosting company said “Oops, there had been a database problem on our end. You sites should be fine.  My professional website was able to be restored. My blog, though, was lost… again.  Years worth of entries, including multiple years of A-to-Z blogging challenge posts – gone forever.

And so, here I am, beginning again.