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Yesterday one of my clients sent me a disheartening email. He had just finished setting up his brand new business blog following my business blog video tutorials and a couple of days later, he went to visit his site and all he saw was a completely blank page!

The tragedy is that he had not gotten around to backing up his site files and data. This is somewhat understandable, as most people wouldn’t think of backing up their site or blog as soon as they get it up and running. It is highly recommended, however, to back up your data on a regular basis (e.g. at least monthly when you first start, then weekly or even more frequently as your blog starts to grow and more content gets added to it.)

My client also let me know in his email that his hosting provider had informed him that his “wordpress crashed” and there was nothing wrong on their side.

I sent my client an empathetic email and suggested he try a couple of things first, before deleting the site from his server and starting the blog installation process all over again:

1) First, make sure that you’re hosting your blog with a reliable web hosting service provider.

Wordpress is a very stable blogging platform used by tens of thousands of businesses and bloggers and it doesn’t “just crash” easily. I have no idea who my client’s hosting provider is, but I used to experience many frustrating crashes and service interruptions that affected my web sites and blogs with my previous hosting provider until I switched to my current provider and I have not experienced any problems at all since I switched providers earlier this year.

I manage dozens of websites and blogs and so I host on a dedicated server with Liquid Web, which I highly recommend and have nothing but extreme praise for. If you are only starting out, or planning to host one or a few blogs, however, then I recommend using Hostgator. They are extremely reliable and offer great support and affordable blog hosting packages.

2) Visit the WordPress forum for support and to view similar instances where other users may have experienced the same problem you are experiencing. Generally you will find a solution, or at least be able to narrow down what may be causing the problem in the WordPress user forum.

3) Log into your hosting account and see if you can make a backup of your MySQL database.

Sometimes the problem may be caused by a corrupt file in your server that doesn’t affect the data stored in your database. If you can save your MySQL database data, this will save you a lot of time if you do have to reinstall your blog files. Reimporting your blog data from an uncorrupted MySQL database file will restore all of your blog configuration settings, posts, links, etc ….

Some other things you can try to do are:

1) Login to your server via FTP and try deleting the .htaccess file (make sure you back up the file first), then refresh the site. If this does not fix the site, or you get a “500 internal server error message”, then just reupload the .htaccess file and move on to something else.

Please note: If you don’t know much about .htaccess, then it’s best to just avoid messing around with the file or file settings altogether.

2) If the above doesn’t fix it straight away, then try opening up the config.php file and see if all of the settings are correct (i.e. if they are pointing to the right database, URL etc…)

3) You can also try disabling all of the WordPress plugins by deleting them from your server and see if that helps. If your site is restored after deleting the plugins from your wp-content plugin folder, then you will need to reinstall each plugin one at a time to identify which plugin is causing the conflict in your site.

4) If you have a downloaded copy of your WordPress installation files, then try overwriting the files in your server using FTP. Be careful not to overwrite your config.php file or wp-content folder. Make sure to overwrite your files with files from the same WordPress version as your original installation, or it may end up causing problems.

If none of the above solutions restore your site, nothing else works and you simply cannot fix your site, then it’s best to reinstall your entire WordPress blog from scratch. If you have already purchased my “step-by-step” how to create a blog video tutorials, simply follow the instructions and tutorials again to quickly get your new blog up and running, then visit the training section for videos and instructions on how to back up your blog files and WordPress database and just count this as an invaluable learning experience for doing business online.

As I said earlier, having your site crash immediately after getting it all set up is highly unfortunate, but not as tragic as failing to back up your site files and database on a regular basis, especially once your site really starts to take off.

For more information on how to grow your business online faster using a business blog go here: Start A Business Blog

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