Today, my forum suddenly became inaccessible. When my forum users first informed me about it, I didn’t worry too much—I thought it was just a small issue caused by my last update. Previously, the forum had been temporarily unavailable twice, but I could always restore it within a few minutes by simply restarting the server.
I assumed this time it would be the same minor problem. I immediately contacted my friend to help me restart the forum, but he told me that the ping failed and the server was unreachable. Curious, I logged into the server’s management website, and that’s when I received the devastating news: the server I used to host the forum, Bluehost China, seems to have gone out of business due to unprofitability. As a result, all the data was instantly lost, and my forum disappeared.
I checked my emails and found that a month ago, they had sent a notice urging me to save and migrate my data. However, I rarely used the email I registered with the server, so I hadn’t seen it. Ignoring that email led to the sudden loss of my forum.
I feel deeply regretful and hope that everyone takes the preservation of their forum data seriously. By “preservation,” I don’t mean relying on the system’s regular automatic backups; you should always be prepared with your own hard drive or storage solution, in case the server provider unexpectedly shuts down, causing forum data to be permanently lost.