I can’t say enough good things about Bluehost. I tried my darndest to destroy esmon.net this afternoon, and they saved my bacon.

How did I try to destroy the site? I deleted its database. Oops.

When I realized what I’d done — trashed every post and every comment on the site — I cried. A lot. I emailed Bluehost and the people at Install4Free (who’d originally installed WordPress for me) for help. I didn’t hear back from Bluehost right away, but one of the Install4Free people got back to me right away (Thanks, Michael!) and said he thought Bluehost would have a backup.

There are so many posts on this site about silly things Poppy has said, or goofy things we’ve done, or nice posts from Rockford. I was seriously feeling nauseous about losing everything.

But Michael gave me hope. I still hadn’t heard from Bluehost, so I called their support phone number. About 20 minutes later, they’d restored everything through February 9. Per another suggestion from Michael, I searched Google for cached pages of posts after the 9th. I was able to find some of them, but I wasn’t able to resurrect all of the comments. After facing the prospect of losing the whole site, though, that didn’t bother me too much.

Here’s the moral of the story: Backup, backup, backup. And don’t mess with your database when you’re on cold medicine. And if you’re looking for a Web host or help installing WordPress, use Bluehost and Install4Free.