Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Blogging and PROgramming.

If you are a regular reader, probably you noticed during the last days I went from about 5 posts per week to 3 posts/week.

I didn’t plan to give up blogging, and I didn’t run out of inspiration… I have a lots of things to write, but lately I find the blog to be too slow, so I thought it would be due to a server upgrade and waited a couple of days.

Yesterday I was writing an interesting article about a new project I started with an important partner (you will find it tomorrow) when I got the 500 internal server error.

Never mind, let me close the page and open it again. 500 again.

Ok, so I deleted the entire site and uploaded the backup.

500…

Ok, maybe something happened to the database, let me check it and back it up.

I wasn’t able to back up the database… I was only able to perform select queries… update, delete, insert and other writing queries gave me errors… and still, of course…

500…

At that time, having a backup was not enough. What’s the point in having a backup if you can’t back it up?

While I was thinking, and the site was softly displaying

500…

Never mind, I was lucky enough to have another database on the same server, so I switched the databases and the site was up and running again.

But the administration panel was still in 500 error. Probably the same issue that screwed the database caused problem to the disk.

I had to delete all files once again and upload them, and finally the site is running.

But I am a quite afraid at the moment, so I am writing this post using the notepad

Obviously I opened a ticket to the customer care, and they answered this way (translated from italian)

we found your DB (dbname) having a table (tablename) with some spam records [so what?]. This causes problems when making queries on such tables [really?].
So we renamed (tablename) to (new tablename)… you are invited to clean the DB blah blah blah

So, forget what probloggers say. Having a backup is not enough.

During your life as a blogger, you will have to face weird errors and stange support teams.

Did it happened to you once or twice?

Now I pasted the post in WP dashboard… 3… 2… 1… Publish (pray)