Most of you have probably noticed that the blog was down for more than six hours today. First of all, I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience (yet again). The problem was caused by… drum roll please… none other than your truly awesome author from The WWW Observer, MYSELF. Yep, that’s right, I caused the darn thing. Shame on me.

Anyway, so let me tell you what happened. I arrived home at around 18:00 (Pretty late actually, I had to attend some training sessions for the next round of the math contest), so I wasn’t really supposed to write a blog post and check all my sites’ stats. All I was SUPPOSED to do was finish my homework, create a presentation for a really lame school event, and of course, practice some more for the math contest. But I wasn’t able to do what I planned to do…

When I signed in to Yahoo! Messenger and Gtalk, my friends kept on bugging me and sending me my sites’ URLs. I was already annoyed and I asked them “What in the world is your problem? Stop sending me my URL, I know about my friggin’ sites!”. Well, to my dismay, they told me that my sites were displaying a “Suspended” page. I didn’t panic just yet, I decided to check my StatCounter stats first. Guess what? My account had 97 as the number of visitors for the day. Surprising, as I usually get around 500 visitors per day. Lo and behold, when I checked my sites, they were indeed displaying a “Suspended” page!

After seeing the dreaded page, I started to panic. What was I to do? Should I blame the hosting company? Should I blame my friends for “hacking” my hosting account and replacing the index files with a fake suspended page? Honestly, I didn’t know what to do. I dropped my books and I tried to contact the hosting company, but to no avail — their site said that live support was online, but no one was replying. I was furious. I even sent the host an e-mail saying “What did I do to deserve this!?”, well, something like that. I received a reply within 10 minutes, and guess what?

…

I opened the mail and I was dumbfounded because I read a big fat “Hello, your account has been suspended for non-payment.” Yikes! I forgot that the due date for the payment was last Saturday! And so, I paid the amount due and I was glad to see my sites up and running.

I was pretty ashamed of myself; I can’t believe that I panicked and even sent a rather embarrassing e-mail to the host. Anyway, kudos to DownTownHost for a very quick response. I received a reply to the e-mail within minutes, and it solved my problem. Even though I was a bit frustrated with the live support, my problem was still solved in less than an hour. Thanks for such a wonderful hosting service guys!

Well guys, I’m literally rolling on the floor laughing right now because of my stupidity. Oh, and it was actually idiotic and illogical of me that instead of checking my sites, I dropped by StatCounter first to check my stats. Pretty weird, huh? I guess I’m a stat-a-holic (and I’m not myself today), after all! But anyway, that’s not the point here. What I’m stressing is that you should always check if you did the right things before blaming others. Catch ya later guys, I’ve got a presentation to finish.

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Web Hosting Business: Not for Rookies!
• DownTownHost Review
• Show Me a Host!