How KeepQuietBackThere.com Died

Enough time has passed that I can now comfortably talk about the end of KeepQuietBackThere.com (KQBT). KQBT was a website I put together to act as a journal of all the stuff we did with the motorhome. When I first built it, I didn't know if it would last more than a few weeks. But, I was interested in learning how to build and host a website, so if it only lasted a short while it was worth it. It turned out to be very popular with family and friends as they followed along with the ups and downs of all our trips. I kept it going for nearly four years, and in that time I covered 20 trips and the site had over 10,000 views. So it ended up being a lot of fun.

Near the end of 2024 the hosting service I was using, Bluehost, was going to raise the price of hosting the site pretty dramatically. I think it was going to go from around $5/month to something like $40/mo. This was a bit of a problem because up until this point the cost of the site was nearly negligible, and I wasn't really looking to spend $40 a month on it. Also, the cost to secure the domain name (the URL keepquietbackthere.com) was going to jump up from like $10/year to $100/year. I didn't want to spend all this money on the site, so I kinda hit the pause button while I reviewed some other options. This was all taking place in the winter, when we weren't taking trips and the site wasn't accessed much, so I had some time to sort this out. Eventually in November my subscription expired, as planned, and the site was not available on the web.

One option I looked into was moving to a different hosting service. The hosting service is a company that provides you with all the tools to build a website, and then publishes it (i.e. hosts it) on the world wide web so people can go to it. I had been using Bluehost which is a very large and well known hosting service. So one option I had was to move the site to another hosting service such as GoDaddy, or Wix, which is who hosts this site. I learned that making that change was going to be challenging, and likely require me to learn a bunch more about all of this than I had planned on. Really up until this point I have been able to build and maintain a website with purely amateur skills in this area. Transferring hosting services was going to require a step beyond that.

After a few months of kicking around options I decided to bite the bullet and renew my subscription with Bluehost. By now they had sent me several "Come back to Us" emails and reduced the annual prices quite a bit. So I figured I would renew and revisit this problem later in 2024. So I renewed my subscription, and the logged back into Bluehost to discover that all of my content was GONE!

This was quite a shock, but I didn't panic because I knew I could restore the site from a backup. The backup I myself had was several months old so I first called Bluehost to ask for their backup. That is when I learned that Bluehost only maintains site backups for 90 days. Of course, at this point it had been 90 days since my subscription expired. I called back desperately hoping that somewhere they had a backup of my site, but I was told no. I would call back 3 more times and learn the same answer. So I was stuck using my own backup of the site. When I went to load that I learned my own backup was corrupt. I would have one more phone call with Bluehost to review my backup, but it was unsuccessful. Once I hung up the phone it hit me that the website was gone.

I told Allyson and she could see how upset I was. It wasn't so much that the website was gone, it was all of the content was no longer available. All the stories and little memories that I made note of felt lost. It was just a really sad few days. I couldn't even talk about it with her, and never told anyone else until now.

The slight silver lining I could find was that in prepping each of the blog posts I had to comb through and curate dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pictures taken by Allyson, me, and eventually Caroline. I would trim the pictures down to the best few for the blog post. Luckily, I had proper backups of all of that work, so we can at least pull up each trip's folder and go through the pictures and reminisce.

So that's the story. The takeaway for any reader who had a website or is thinking of building one it to make sure you are properly managing your backups!