Yesterday morning I woke up to discover my blog was gone. All my posts, pictures, thoughts, memories and moments to treasure had disappeared over night and in their place was an ugly, generic page by godaddy.com informing me that the URL was being parked. i.e. Sorry, nothing to see here.

I first assumed that either my domain or hosting had expired and that for reasons unknown to me, I hadn’t been notified to renew – I emailed dear husband and begged him to contact godaddy and figure out what was wrong, then ran out the door for our play date which I was now running late to.

But when Dan called, godaddy basically told us that we didn’t exist and that there was no information indicating that they’d been hosting my blog. WTF? So several phone calls and email digging through later, I finally figured out that my blog was actually being hosted through my father’s godaddy account (very generous of him) and we’d all forgotten. So when the night before my father had taken down some of his old websites, he hadn’t realized that mine was included in that mix. Whoops.

But in the process of all this running around and figuring out, I temporarily redirected my domain to my old wordpress.com account. I fiddled around with the dashboard and themes and thought to myself, “This isn’t so bad.” When I was running the review blog, having my own URL and professional looking self hosted blog had seemed important to me, but now that this is back to just being a personal blog, it seems less so. I’m keeping my handy dandy URL because it’s fairly cheap and I’m not ready to give it up and risk losing it forever, but for now – I’m going back to the wordpress hosted world.

Being hosted by wordpress has a few minor disadvantages, mainly less options in my blog’s appearance unless I’m willing to pay money (which I may someday) but it also has several advantages:

1. Free hosting – my father was already paying to host his current domains so it didn’t really make a difference to throw mine into the mix, but for Dan and I to pay for the hosting on our own would cost almost 10 times as much as what we’re currently paying with monthly bills instead of annual ones.
2. Less downtime, I’m betting – because wordpress has their brand to protect, when things go wrong, they’ll probably fix it a lot faster than godaddy will. This is just speculation but I’m betting it will be true.
3. I can trouble shoot on my own – When things go wrong server side, it’s pretty much up to my husband, my father or the invisible powers that be to figure it out and  fix it. I know very little about all that back end server stuff and truthfully don’t want to know. But I do like being able to fix my problems myself and by going back to a wordpress hosted blog, I should be able to manage the blog entirely by myself now. Hurray!