I recently finished editing and cleaning up the text for what I used to call The Empty House, making it ready for publication, but I don’t yet have a cover for it. (I have changed to title to That Which Dwells Below, because that more clearly suggests the nature of the story.) My artist had some good ideas, but she hasn’t been well enough lately to be able to do any work on it. It’s nothing serious, but it blunts the sharp creativity which makes her covers work so well. I found something else creative to occupy me while I was waiting for her to feel up to the job. The delay wouldn’t have been long, and Saturday, October 5, though she was not quite ready yet, she began to work on it. 

But earlier that morning I got emails from Jetpack, which is a service that monitors websites, and sends a notice if they go down, or have a similar on-line problem. My book site, Allen Wold’s Books, was down, then back up, then down, then back up, then three more times. After a while, it went down again, back up again, then down again, and this time it did not come back. 

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This is the site where I have a list of all the books which have been published, with a thumbnail of the cover, a blurb similar to the one on the back cover, a link to an essay of how and why the book was written, another link to a sample of the first twenty to thirty pages, and links to each of the books on Amazon, (or on ReAnimus Press, which republishes out of print books). Some of my older books are not otherwise easy to find on line.

I tried to go to my book site, but the server could not be found. Then I tried to go to my site provider, but it, too, could not be found. It would seem that the provider which hosted my site no longer existed. I spent over six hours trying to find out how to recover my site, or what had happened to my ISP, but there was nothing I could do. Even the service which can recover a down site couldn’t do it, because the site was not just down, it no longer existed.

The rest of the day didn’t go very well either. 

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Fortunately, I have copies on my computer of all the text and graphics which had been on my book site, so though the site is gone, I still have all the content. But I had no screenshot of the home page, so I couldn’t rebuild it to look the way it used to. I just now took one of my blog site, since the two sites had similar designs, and I’ll use that to help me recover.

I’m hoping that my provider just had a problem with their servers, which, being a small company with five-star ratings, could easily have happened, and that they will come back after a while. But in my research I learned that my host had, since 2022, shrunk from fourteen employees to four, then to one. I am fairly sure that my host is gone forever, taking my site, and hundreds of others with it. I received no notice that this might happen, my last email from them was a receipt for my monthly charge, and that was in 2022, shortly before I notified them of a change of email address, which they acknowledged.

I will have to build my book site all over from scratch. Or maybe pay to have it done for me. This site is important, because I direct anybody I talk with to it, so that they can see what I have written. Some of those people actually buy books, which they might not have done otherwise. But either way, getting my site rebuilt, whether by me or someone else, will take some time. I’ll have to relearn everything so that I can do that, or find someone whom I can trust to make it the way I want it to be.

This is not the blog post I intended to send out. But it will have to do for now.

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At six thirty this morning, October 8, my ISP and my site came back. My ISP had, indeed, suffered from being unable to access their servers. Gasp! Sigh! The relief is almost painful. My next post will report on the publication of That Which Dwells Below.