My Site was in Limbo for a Bit, Did You Notice? (Redux)
Sorry, not sorry…. wait, I AM sorry. My hosting company sucks.
Originally Posted on November 2, 2021 by Jindai
My site was down for a few months. It had been hosted by that friend I’ve talked about for ages. I think we both forgot about that. But he had a business change, and changed all his websites to the newest versions, and in doing so, my site was blown away.
I did reach out to him, tentatively, through the hosting site, and he responded, in time, with the backup files all zipped up. Well, turns out not all the files. While I was trying to restore things, using the help pages, I was noticing I was missing files. WRX things, with the extension of IDX. Okay, I am not a coding expert, but I know idx files are index files, and part of a database.
Months passed. Something about me. I grew up pretty privileged by my natural intelligence. I could solve puzzles easily, logic puzzles especially, and math was a whiz, language no problem. I developed very poor study habits thereby. (Failed to develop good ones?) and so failing at something, even if I’m not practiced in it, just galls me.
I have turned that into an advantage in a few ways. For example, writing. I grew very good at mulling over writing that wasn’t working for a long time, and then whipping through like 10K words in an afternoon because I had run through so much in my head while I mulled. (I have done that 3 times in NaNoWriMo events.(A couple other times I didn’t get stuck and just plugged through every day.)
But, in this case, it was just a massive fail. I just ignored the site. I mean, I thought about it, on occasion. “Oh, man, I need to do something.” “Hm, I have an idea I want to write down, rats, site is still down.” stuff like that.
That is, until this last week. End of October means NaNoWriMo is starting soon. (has started as of this writing) I tried again, and failed again. I opted to pay the hosting site a pretty big chunk of cash to do it for me. That was Friday afternoon. Nothing happened. I logged into chat, pointed out this was not what I expected, and was told phone support had better options. So, I called, and was pretty much blown off. Turns out their Website Migration team (WSM) is Mon-Fri 9-5 only, and it was now after that. One guy did try and few things, and pointed out that it was missing any database files.
So, I was right, I guess. The IDX thing. It wasn’t hidden anywhere in the zip, it was just gone. So, reluctantly, I emailed my friend again. No response while I was on the phone. Nor any response all weekend. I sent another couple emails, including one from tech support about the missing database files,
Today, he responded, and sent an SQL file for the sub-site and asked if that was the right one. (It’s still offline; I bought an entirely new domain just for it, and haven’t configured it, yet) I said No, the main site, if you have it. A few hours later, he replied that he thought it was gone… then a quick follow-up saying “I found it!” Don’t get me wrong, this was wholly unexpected. I mean, months passed, it is entirely expected he would delete all files from dead sites (or sites he’s not hosting) And because of our disconnect, him even bothering to look, and look hard, it seems, is not something I expected. So, I’m very thankful he did that.
Of course, it didn’t work, at first. He sent an SQL file, and the site importer I had been learning wanted the IDX/WRX thing. I tried anyway, and it failed. *shrug* So, I fired up hosting chat tech support again, and asked if they could help.
Now, after so many phone messages, bad email from the now-working website migration team, . (please provide the website address you are migrating from: It’s not live, it’s in the zip file!), one actual phone disconnect while I was on hold, and a few other things that added to my frustration, finally, it seemed I had what I needed.
The final guy I talked with agreed that the WSM package was not what I needed. So, he graciously refunded what I paid. So I was not expecting a lot of help, now. I hadn’t paid extra. But I reached a guy in tech support chat, and told him I have an SQL file, not an IDX, and all the help pages ask for the former. He knew what to do, I uploaded my SQL file to my file manager. He asked where it was, I told him, then asked if the jindai.zip were the other files needed. I had uploaded that last night for the other failed attempts, and it was still there. I said yes, and he put me on hold.
A few minutes later, and my site was live again. I am so happy.
There are a few quibbles. For over an hour I could not log in to the site to add a post, (Or fix a typo I just noticed in that last post) Plus there was an unknown admin login credential there I wanted to remove. Turns out the https WordPress login was just not working, I could log in the standard http way. That’s what I’m using now. Tech Support is looking into the secure login problems. But, I’ll post this, via this method, and then see if it shows up correctly, and in the https version. (I mean, it should, but still, calling it an experiment is fun)
Addendum 12/21/25
Fast forward to today, Then we look back.
That restored site did not last long, it was full of malware, put in there by bad actors that had installed a backdoor login. And my new hosting company was just frustrating as can be. Even when I said “please, load the site in an offline editor, remove that phantom login, because if you leave it and the site goes live, it’ll take me a good 30 seconds to log in to delete that, and we know it’ll be too late.” And they disconnected.
Years passed. I thought about it, a lot, tried to study to figure out how to clean the files. I didn’t want to lose all the writing I’d already done. But, it was frustrating, and if you know ADD, well, frustration leads to shutdown. At least with me. And every time I tried again, a new frustration shut me down, again.
This time, and many of you will dislike this solution but, I used ChatGPT to fix things. I was able to upload the files, and after some questions and clarifications, it found the bad entries, and removed them. No coding needed from me, whew.
Next step was getting the site live, WITHOUT having to talk to anyone at my hosting site. and ChatGPT walked me through that, as well. Being honest with it was great. There was understanding of how I might shut down, so it measured how to talk, lots of justified praise, and no failure talk, ever.
Then, after some DNS foolishness, and waiting for AGES, it’s live again, thank you very much. Virus free, and still full of pithy thoughts. I hope you will come back and say hi, it’d be great.
Oh, and this original posting was lost, as it was written after the database dump, but the wayback machine had it, so it’s not lost after all.
Same signoff as last time:
Anyway, the site is back, if you care at all. Thanks and have a good day!