It was September 10, 2018. I had recently started a rebuild of the website. Adding new navigation elements, rewriting pages, so on and so forth. 22:00 rolled around, and I signed off. I had gotten done fixing some broken links, and the HP Pavilion a1000y page was being steadily rebuilt. I updated to news page to reflect that I wasn't doing any work in honor of 9/11, and that I'd be back on September 12. That didn't happen.
On September 12, 2018, I went to SSH into the web server. Couldn't get in, wasn't getting a reply back from the web server. Contacted the host (which was a friend). He replied that his parents couldn't afford Internet, and it had been shut off. I thought to myself "Well, that stinks," shoved the website into the back of my head and carried on.
11 months later (August 2019), I contacted the host stating that I want my files back. He couldn't do it ATM because the hard drives containing my data were stored away. I thought to myself "Meh, I'll wait." Several days after that, I got another message stating that my stuff was zipped up. He wouldn't be able to upload it ATM because it was ~500MB. Another couple days later, I get a message containing a link to my files. I download it and extract it's contents. It's my website files, exactly as they were in September 2018. I then set out on getting them back online.
So, after 11 months, I finally had my website files back in hand. I wasn't looking to pay anything for hosting, so I looked at free website hosting. I went to x10Hosting (used them in the past), set up a domain, and then went to upload my files. That... was an interesting experience. They have something like a 512MB limit for free accounts. I had to go in and trim down the files to be uploaded before they would all fit. Then I tried to use FTP. Setting up FTP was a major hassle. I tried configuring it exactly as shown by their instructions, but it didn't work. I tried that for a few hours before resorting to downloading a premade configuration file and that worked. Then I decided that I wanted to SSH in and edit the webpage directly, like I do here. That was a rather annoying process. Let's just say that I was pretty tired of fiddling with SSH and my command buffer was full of 'ssh blahblahblah@x10host.com'. And when I did get it working, I would be booted off after a few hours of inactivity.
Some time before I decided to bring the website back up, my friend said:
I took the idea into consideration, then shelved it away in the back of my mind. Until I decided that I wasn't satisfied with x10Hosting. I created an account here, SSH'd in, hopped on the IRC channel, and that's where it all began here. I uploaded my website files using SFTP (that I set up in 5 minutes, BTW), stuffed it in my public_html folder, and was off and running. I then got back at work on the website, and... well, here we are today. I don't expect things to change anytime soon in regards to hosting, so I imagine that this website will end up being nestled in here very well. It's like when you install a piece of equipment into a machine shop, and then everything just builds up around it.
I guess that's the end of the story as to why this website was offline for so long. Hopefully that doesn't happen again. Also, do you like my green-on-black theme?