Downtime, a whole new look, rebuild of content… A lot of our long -time visitors and customers wondered what happened to Lovings.com at the end of 2021. Here’s the whole story:
Disaster
On December 12th, the virtual private server we were renting from Hostinger failed. When this happens, the first, simplest thing to do is to restore a recent previous backup. However, all 4 backups Hostinger had were also corrupted, even though they were made at the time server was fine.
We contacted the hosting company, but instead of help received endless runarounds and gaslighting. During the first couple of sleepless days, we wrestled with non-existing support & waited hours for each support reply, only to get canned platitudes & delays. Meantime, we discovered that the backup they claimed was the most current was over 3 weeks old, and realized that the host’s backup system was broken, and they were trying to cover it up. Time for plan B.
To the rescue
No time to lose! While even Amazon experiences outages, websites CAN’T be down for a long time. We hunted down a new hosting company we heard a lot of good things about, got a new server and asked them to help us pick out any pieces left. They were amazing! They hooked us up with a bunch of their veteran server wranglers who spent two days trying to recover as much of the old databases and other content as possible. We rescued the main site database and enough of the back end to at least be able to access the data. But, the website itself was trashed beyond help.
Rome wasn’t built in a day
After 3 days without sleep, I crashed for 4 hours, got up, and decided “To hell with it, I’m rebuilding from scratch!” I wanted to update and modernize the site for a very long time, and this was the boot in the rear that finally made it happen. I had two week old customer and ad records. I had customer correspondence for the last 2 weeks. I had all the ad photos on the local office drive (we always clean up and optimize the photos before they go up, because everyone deserves the best ad they can have).
Rome wasn’t built in a day. But new Lovings.com was!
Luckily, I thought about how I wanted new Lovings.com to work and look for a while already. Rebuilding was simply a matter of deciding on the best platform that’s both quality and fast to develop on. The basic website with all ads was up in a day – the most important thing was to get Lovings customers visible again. That accomplished, I’m now rebuilding the less critical parts, adding features, and fine tuning the site’s speed, SEO and resilience. The latest thing accomplished was a vast speed improvement through installation and fiddling with the LiteSpeed server, as well as a bunch of local account & website settings.
What now?
We still want to build it better – expect additional features, return of more useful blog content from the old website, and I’d LOVE to hear from you!
-Do you have a specific feature you’d like to see?
-Is anything a problem?
-When you visit an ad from a category, would you like to see the thumbnails of other ads from same category under the ad you’re viewing, so you can click through and not have to back up? It would slow down the ad display a little, so it’s a tradeoff – what do you think?
Please let me and the team know in the comments. Love ya!
Webmistress
4 Responses
Wish you the best on rebuilding and getting your momentum back. Totally can appreciate the fact that this happened to you. Had the same thing happen for my personal site.
To your question. I would not suggest you worry about navigation for now.
What I would suggest: Focus on how we know one of these ladies is real… All the ad has is a phone number. Anything at all that you can do that helps show that the community has vetted them, someone has met them… or that you have vetted them in some way and made sure they are real… encouraging them to provide more than just a phone number….
Hi Tom,
Thank you for your comment :-). We do have a rating system in place, that’s used by the ladies’ clients to give feedback on the quality of service they received. All the internal ads – ads that are not simple links to outside websites – have it (little hearts in the upper right corner). While the system is not perfect, the ads with a larger number of ratings do give a pretty good idea what to expect. As we’re not an escort agency but just an advertising site, we’re not able to do extensive vetting, but do require a proof of age from our advertisers. In addition, a good number of them include the links to their social media, OnlyFans and/or personal websites, so you can get a better feel for their personality and whether you are a match through those too.
No idea whether I could help or not but would offer the observation that image optimization is not your page speed (performance) area to focus on.
https://webpagetest.org/result/220420_BiDcD2_4YT/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1
Your page speed challenges look to be 90% server-side. Although I wonder if you need those two woff2 files. Other than those two files I would focus on the server-side. Are you sure your hosting is adequate?
Hi again,
Great info! Thank you, we were using G-Metrix, and I was not aware of this speed check resource. I’ll definitely include it in my tool belt. Yes, we’ve been fine-tuning our speed for a while now, and need to continue. Hosting should be adequate, but WP is a resource hog and we’re still fiddling with caching and removing unnecessary file loads (yes, those woff2 files are not needed on the homepage, and I’ve been researching how to selectively remove them without adding more plugins, grrr). Btw, because of caching, the first run on any speed check seems to take more time and require a lot of server “juice”, and the second run is very good… I’m new to Litespeed caching and still trying to figure out how to deal with this and what it means.
We will probably implement a CDN in the near future as well, I just want to streamline the existing situation first, before introducing new elements that could mask the issues (and make sure I found a CDN that’s adult-friendly, to avoid unpleasant surprises…)