travelblog: run by one guy from his basement

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Hey everyone,

It has been quite an exciting few days for us here in Europe, but unfortunately it has also been a frustrating few days out in cyberspace.

Many of you have let us know that you could no longer access the travelblog.org site to read our blog. In fact, travelblog.org itself was down from August 1-5.

It's just come up today, and after reading the tech support forum, I can now tell you what has happened.

Unfortunately, the story ain't pretty

So apparently on the 1st, the one single (not backed-up) server that hosts the entire travelblog site got hit by a Denial-of-Service attack. The owner/admin of travelblog, in a state of panic, attempted to restart the mysql database. Unfortunately, he's not very good at mysql, used the wrong command and wiped out thousands of blog entries instead. He admits now that he doesn't know how to bring them back.

This also means that until he does bring them back, we have lost *every* single entry we have written so far except for the first post (and that entry was written prior to our trip to Ireland last year)..

At least we can acess the site now. For the moment however, we will still post our entries here on travelblog (but saving our entries somewhere else first for safety). But unless I get a better sense of what this one guy in a basement in Thailand can actually do to keep his his own website running properly, I will start looking for another travel journal site to use, preferably one with a database backup system and an admin who actually knows what he is doing.

Ah well, at least the site is free. You get what you pay for.

If any of you can recommend a more reliable site, please let us know!

A little status on what we've been up to: we are currently in Lugano, Switzerland after having spent a few nights in Zurich with family friends, and prior to that we were also in Valencia and blisteringly hot (we kid you not) Seville. We will spend a few more nights here before moving on to the Cinque Terre area in Italy.

By the way, Lugano is absolutely mind-numbingly beautiful. You have to see it to believe it.

Pictures coming soon...

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Comments

[Frank and Betty]

Very relieved to be able to read your Travelblog again
Missed reading your travelblog and looking at your photos! So relieved that you are back on. Looking forward to your photos from Europe. Take care. May God Bless you!