Oh hello there! It’s been one heck of a stressful week over here – on Tuesday morning while I was in a very important, very long meeting a flood of concerned messages, texts and tweets started to roll in from friends and family unable to access the blog. It was one of those moments where I instantly knew something was horribly wrong and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. This moment of panic was followed by confirming one of my ultimate nightmares, my blog being completely down, and frantic phone calls to both GoDaddy and Google, neither of which ended up being much help. Tuesday dinner date night with my guy was spent with both of us on our laptops searching for a solution (I’m lucky enough to be dating a developer) and instead it got even worse… not only was my blog inaccessible, someone else had purchased my domain in a brief period of lapse.

Fast forward 24-hours and we’re back up and running again after much stress and my entire fall shopping wardrobe budget. I figured I’d share a few key lessons learned from this little nightmare of mine to hopefully prevent you from ever having to deal with such a headache:

• Don’t trust auto-renew: Even if your domain is set up to auto-renew, still mark the date on your calendar and verify that everything went smoothly. Turns out it’s not something you can always rely on and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
• If you use Google Apps, log into your account & re-confirm all of your information: In May Google made some changes to their Google Apps platform causing all users to need to log in to re-verify their account and payment information. For many bloggers (like myself), failing to do this can result in your account being inaccessible and renewal to not process.
• Make sure all account email addresses are up to date: If you’re using Blogger + your domain,  Blogger automatically generates an email address (bloggeradmin@yourdomain.com) for you and this is where all domain-related emails will be sent. You may not even know this email account exists so I’d recommend logging into your Google Apps account and having this email address forwarded to your normal email address.

I’m beyond thankful that everything was able to be resolved and although this (big) expense isn’t quite one I had budgeted for, it made me really realize how important the blog is to me and all that I’ve built around the Pretty & Fun brand. Hopefully you can learn a few lessons from my troubles and take the time to protect your own blog and domain from similar woes.

It’s good to be back.