When a blooming blog business vanishes into the ether

Owners of blog-based businesses don’t have to worry about fires or floods wrecking their storefronts, but losing site archives to a faulty Web server can be just as catastrophic.

Mir Kamin, the Georgia-based writer and entrepreneur behind bargain-hunter blog WantNot.net and popular personal site WouldaShoulda.com, discovered that the hard way last week when server trouble threatened to wipe out more than three years of her online work.

After three days, Kamin held out only a few pixels of hope that Web host WiredHub.net could recover the data. And Kamin had only a month’s worth of personal archives she could use to rebuild her sites, she admitted at Cornered Office, the “bloggy outpost” she maintains at professional mothers’ community WorkItMom.com.

But when I called Kamin Thursday, she announced her sites had suddenly reappeared that morning. She’d begun moving both domains temporarily to an inexpensive GoDaddy server while researching higher-end options for a permanent switch. But before the process was complete, she happened to log on to her sites and see that the archives had been restored.

“It was a stroke of dumb luck,” Kamin said. After saving complete backups to her Mac hard drive, Kamin canceled the hosting switch. She predicted most readers would be able to access the sites by the weekend.

But the temporary outage might cause long-term financial damage to her business. Both sites generate revenue via the BlogHer ad network. In addition to losing three-plus days of ad impressions, Kamin said the overall traffic hit will knock her to a lower BlogHer payment tier for the month, taking an extra 10 percent chunk out of November ad revenues.

WantNot also has affiliate deals with about three dozen e-commerce sites. Every time a reader clicks through from Kamin’s site and completes a purchase at one of those online stores, she gets a small cut of the sale. She’ll not only lose several days worth of commissions, but she fears some customers might now do their holiday shopping elsewhere.

“November’s my biggest month,” she said. “I’m sure there are people who won’t be back.”

With two-thirds of Kamin’s income coming from WantNot.net and WouldaShoulda.com, that’s a significant problem. She said she wants to share her cautionary tale so that other blog business owners can avoid similar nightmares.

“I used to back up every week” before falling out of the habit, she said. “I will now back up the entire site probably daily.”

The experience gave Kamin another kind of wake-up call as well. After the sites disappeared without explanation, readers started to worry about her. “I got all these messages saying, ‘Are you all right?’ ” she said.

The caring response helped Kamin put the crisis in perspective. “Something really awful could’ve happened,” she wrote at Cornered Office. “What did happen is that my business got screwed up, but my family is fine … I’m grateful we’re talking about a server failure and not a mortal illness or horrible accident.”

Some tips for avoiding catastrophic online data loss:

“ Before signing on with a host provider, investigate its service guarantees, run Web searches on the company to explore its track record, and ask current customers how well it solves client problems.

“ Frequently back up the entire site data on your hard drive — and perhaps an online storage site as well.

“ Maintain a blog with another provider so you can post updates for your customers while your main site’s offline.

“ Google can be a data-recovery godsend. It keeps copies of Web pages in its archives so searchers can view cached versions of a page if the live one is down.

For instance, searching “site:wantnot.net” in Google returned 1,080 results Thursday morning, and “site:wouldashoulda.com” brought back 1,680.

Copying and pasting a complete site’s worth of cached text can be an arduous task, but it probably beats losing those archives forever.