Betshopboy.net

Hello friends! I’m back online, finally! Those of you who have been wondering where I had gone missing in action for the past two weeks had one hell of a story to hear from me. Those of you who had emailed me (you know who you are) to enquire about my blog, I appreciate your concern and thank you for your encouraging words.

The Nightmare
Year 2007 ended on a sour note when I came home on Christmas Eve from a short weekend getaway and discovered the blog was down. It had suffered an outage through no fault of mine. The blog was hosted with a reseller so the first instinct was to contact him to clarify the situation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a respond from him and no light was shed on the outage. I then emailed technical support of the hosting company and was told within a couple of hours that the outage was due to the reseller’s domain name expired. They further explained that as my blog was being hosted with that reseller’s account, they couldn’t do anything to help me without written consent from him. OMG!! I was tearing my hair out, and over-whelmed with feeling of helplessness.

(You can imagine how frustrated I was at this point and the stress of losing all my content is weighing down on me constantly)

The days and weeks that followed saw me frantically trying to contact the reseller, who finally responded after a week with a “sorry”! What a sorry respond from that irresponsible chap who had accepted my payment (for 1 year) but not honoring his side of the contract. He was in breach of a contract and betrayed my trust in him. It was also cowardice of him not to come clean and offer an explanation!

Ushering a brand New Year did not improve the situation. While seemingly every bloggers were posting their new year resolutions and/or reviewing the blogging year that has just past, I was somewhere down in the doldrums, feeling sorry for myself and in some serious soul searching mode. The emotional upheaval I experienced from this episode ranged from frustrations, anxieties, anger, helplessness, fears, and resignation to fate and finally a glimmer of hope (when my friend offered his help) followed by jubilations!

Neither one to be involved in online slanging matches nor name-calling, I thought long and hard about naming the culprit who had done this disservice to my blog. After consulting a few friends, the general consensus was to name the reseller so that others can be warn of his unethical behaviors and be aware of his antics, instead of keeping quiet and let bygones be bygones. Blogging about it will also serve to relief the pain I’ve gone through and share the lessons learnt.

Hall of Shame
This reseller’s name is Chee Kui and he runs several blogs – miriguy dot com, weblord-online and others. He talked about his ambition of earning his first million online before he turns 30 and my thought is that even if he somehow manages to earn his millions, he will never ever to successful, given his immature disposition and unethical character. This chap has the dubious honor of being the first to be incorporated in my Hall of Shame page.

Lessons Learnt
I’ve paid a high price (not only in monetary terms) to “procure” these lessons, so listen up good to avoid my following my footsteps.

• I must learn to be more streetwise and check the other party’s background thoroughly before going into any contract or agreement.

• Backup, backup, backup!! I can’t empathsize enough about this point. I did backup my blog (if not it would not be restored), but I backup using plugin instead of the simpler method of exporting the content and save it as an XML file. It would be less painful and much simpler should you need to restore your blog.

New Year New Host
Betshopboy.net is now hosted at Site5, courtesy of my good friend, Jay Shaffstall of OnlineOpportunity. Jay has never turn me away when I needed help, even during the holidays when he should be celebrating with their friends and families, he has been helping me restore this blog, every steps of the way. For that, I am forever grateful to this kind man and I can’t thank him enough.

If there’s a positive I can take out of this unfortunate event, it is the many friends who cared to drop me emails enquiring what happened to the blog and offering their support during these difficult time. There are still people who cares and who are not afraid to lend a helping hand.

The outage deprived me of wishing all my readers through my blog posts a Merry Christmas 2007 and a Happy New Year 2008! So here is my belated wishes to all of you! May the New Year bring you good health and surging traffic to your blogs! Let’s all leave whatever troubles we encountered behind and charge forward to an amazing year!