It was bound to happen. And I only have myself to blame. I have been running this blog on an AWS LAMP stack since its inception several years ago. A couple weeks back the site crashed. This has happened in the past when the disk fills up, and I could usually recover with a reboot. But not this time. Unfortunately, I lost my key so I couldn’t SSH into the OS to recover from the crash.
Even after several reboots over several days, the site didn’t come up. To make matters worse, I didn’t have a backup of the site. This is when I realized I was toast.
Not wanting to drop out of Google’s index, I spun up another WordPress install on another host, SiteGround, that I use for some of my other sites. Then, using an archive of my site on the Way Back Machine, I began manually recreating each post & page. I used Google Search Console to see which pages were visited recently and restored the ones with the most impressions first.
I am still rebuilding the site but hope to be done in the next week or so.
Moral to This Story
Don’t lose your private key!