Forbidden Error

Forbidden Error

Last night my heart stopped!  Well it didn’t actually stop but when I signed into my blog, I got a 403 FORBIDDEN ERROR. message.  At first I thought maybe WordPress was doing some upgrades since I have seen many sites upgrading lately.  So I cleared the page and went to sign in under admin, still getting the same message.  I decided to give it a little time, hoping my thoughts of the site being upgraded was correct.  About an hour later I checked back and the message was still there!  What do I do now? Or what did I do to receive this message?  Now I’m a nervous wreck, thinking my blog was all gone!  I checked my email and there was one from HostGator letting me know they had disabled my account due to excessive CPU usage.  I had not a clue what this meant so I messaged my grandson who is the computer guru that helped me migrate my shared site to my own with HOSTGATOR  but he wasn’t home. I was waiting for my grandson and his brains to come up with a fix so I figured I’d wait until morning to continue with my dilemma, thinking maybe it was a bad dream.

Morning came and it wasn’t a dream, the FORBIDDEN ERROR was still there!  I replied to their email and ask what I could do to remedy the problem and they replied back almost immediately telling me they had enabled my admin so I could make the corrections needed.  When I went to log in, I got another error message, I just knew my blog was gone forever.  I decided to write them once more, this time in ALL CAPS, letting them know that I still couldn’t get on my blog even with them enabling my blog.  Within ten minutes I got a reply and MY BLOG IS BACK UP AND RUNNING!! Seems like many of my plugins were using a lot of CPU’s so they installed WP Super Cache plug in to correct the problem.

I have to give a big KUDOS to Chris D. from HostGator for taking the time to do download the plugin, instead of just telling me what to do.  He did add instructions for me to follow what he did so if I have this problem in the future, I’ll have an idea where to start looking.

I’m the type of person that tries to figure things out on my own but when it comes to my blog, I didn’t want to push the wrong button and wipe it off the map!   I’m using this as another learning experience in blogging and now if someone panics and has the same problem I can pay it forward and help them correct the problem.

I’m very pleased with the help I received from  HOSTGATOR and would highly recommend them for your website hosting.