Why Was I Suspended By 123-reg?

It’s great to be back! I’m so sorry my blog was down for such a long time & wanted to use this first post back as an opportunity to explain why my blog was suspended by 123-reg.

To start with, I was really upset by the ‘suspended’ message you could all see for 10 days(!!!) as it made it look like I had:

a) not paid my bill or

b) had abusing my account (i.e. taking part in fraudulent or illegal activity)

I can assure you that neither of these were the case. It upset me greatly that my online reputation may have been negatively affected by this. I also believe that, because my blog was down during & for the weeks after #BloggersFestival, I may have missed opportunities to work with brands & grow my readership.

The reason my account was suspended was that, according to 123-reg, one of my blog’s files (the admin-ajax.php) was too long & was taking more than 2 minutes for their servers to read. This issue occurred soon after an update to their system. I was also not the only blogger affected.

I found out that my blog had been suspended when a friend tweeted me to let me know. This was on Friday the 4th of September, the day before #BloggersFestival. I opened a ticket with my hosting provider, 123-reg, as soon as I found out there was a problem.

I heard nothing. On Thursday 10th, I received an email from the provider to say that my ticket had been closed & that they hoped they had been able to solve my issue. Errrm… No. I’d had no word from them since opening the ticket. My blog was still showing as suspended! I was on my way home from a hospital appointment, about an hour from home when I received this message. I got straight onto the live chat when I got home, to be told that my ticket had been ‘mis-labeled’ which was why it had been closed. The person I spoke to assured me they would get my ticket seen to asap because I had waited much longer than I should have. So I waited.

On Monday 14th I phoned the 123-reg support helpline to find out what was happening. A blogger friend who was having the same issue had got an answer this way & I wasn’t prepared to wait any longer. It was at this point that I was told my admin-ajax.php file was too long, causing the server to ‘trip’ & suspend my blog. I was advised to delete plugins & told I would only know if this had worked if my blog didn’t become suspended again. Guess what – it didn’t work.

I was then advises by support to re-name the admin-ajax.php so that when my site tried to find the file it wouldn’t be able to. This would stop my blog ‘tripping’ & subsequent being suspended. This worked, to an extent. My blog stayed up, but I was unable to do anything to my sidebar. This was clearly not a viable solution, but a ‘quick fix’. I was at my wits end by this point. 10 days without my blog (or any contact from 123-reg had been really hard. I’m not able to get out as much since I started to reduce my Gabapentin (so Dan & I can try for a baby).

My move from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress was supposed to give me more freedom, but instead left me at the mercy of the hosting provider. I hated the feeling that my blog could go down at any moment. I was debating going back to Blogger & taking my domain name with me – at least that way I wouldn’t loose all access to my site & be unable to blog!

I turned to one of the Facebook groups I am a member of, the ‘DYOB: Blog Beautiful’ group, for advice. These bloggers were fantastic. They told me that a long file shouldn’t cause a blog to be suspended, reassured me that self-hosted WordPress was the right way to go & suggested I moved hosting providers pronto! I chose my new provider (BlueHost) & spent 4 days going through the process of moving my files over to them. I have to say, the support I received from BlueHost has been fantastic! I had to go through a 21 step process to transfer my files & had someone on their live chat talking me through the majority of these steps. It went wrong the first time I tried. My home page showed, but on clicking on a post, a 404 error appeared. BlueHost were great & were able to tell me that this was because of a problem with (a different) file being accessed. They couldn’t explain this issue, as the file that wasn’t being accessed properly was actually where the 404 error message is found! So I tried again. This time, instead of moving the whole of the public_html folder (which was what 123-reg told me to do), I just moved the wp-content folder (which was what the 21 step process told me to do). I had to install WordPress with BlueHost to do this in order to get the framework files. The second broken file must have been one of these from my 123-reg installed WordPress, as it worked!

I’m so glad I had people around to reassure me that this was not what self-hosted should be & encouraged me to seek a different provider.

So now I’m back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I thought this would be a good opportunity to have a wiggle around of my posting schedule. I’m taking part in an exciting YouTube collaboration starting next month & will be changing one of my upload days to fit in with this. So that I’m not posting on my blog as well as my YouTube channel on the same day, my Friday post will be moved to Saturday. Here’s my new Blog Schedule.

Thank you to everyone who sent me such reassuring messages during this difficult time, I really appreciate all of your love & support!

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