If you’ve been on our blog before you’d know a few things…
This is where the magic happens. We blog every single wedding we photograph, and we don’t just slap up some photos and call it a day. We put a ton of effort into it. We are in the business of telling stories. That’s mostly done with a camera, but here on the blog – it was also done with words. A LOT of words.
Over the past 10 years, our blog has been a virtual collection of both our work and our personal lives. We’ve told stories of over 300 weddings. We’ve shared love stories of how couples came to fall in love and get engaged. We’ve shared high school seniors before they graduate, businesses working hard to take their career to the next level.
We’ve shared triumphs – like our work being published in magazines, my mom being declared cancer free, my son graduating high school and heading off to college, and new business endeavors like our nonprofit. We’ve shared our defeats – like when I got hit in the head by a drunk groomsman and looked like I’d been punched, or when we devastatingly lost a bride and dear friend Nikki to cancer.
We believe that every person we photograph is worthy of the world’s time. We’ve connected strangers through the stories on this blog. I’ll never forget shopping in Old Navy one day, randomly sifting through the cardigans when the sweetest woman came up to me up to me ask if I was Karin from TenSixteen. She shared how she followed our blog religiously and read every post. She could even name some of her favorite couples that she’d read the stories of.
We’ve been hired countless times because of this blog – not because of the photos, but because there was such an obvious connection with our clients that went deeper than just a business transaction. In this place, there was a sense of hope.
That all came crashing (literally) down 3 weeks ago.
(*I have chosen to use images from the Sex and the City episode where Carrie loses her hard drive because A. I think they are fitting, B. I’m hoping that it’s Google friendly to say “Sex and the City episode where Carrie loses her hard drive” so we can show up again to the world wide web, and C. I find it funny, and if it makes me happy at this point – I’m going for it.)
It started with simply noticing our email wasn’t working. I thought maybe it was something weird with my phone. I’d just done an update, and you know how things tend to go wonky every time you update. So I brushed it off. When I went to check it on the computer and it wasn’t working I immediately went to my hosting site bludomain.com On the support page they indicated that they were receiving a high number of support tickets, that they knew there was an issue, and that they were working to resolve it. So I moved on thinking by the next day things would be up and running again. I didn’t even think to check the website, but after going to bludomain’s facebook page and seeing the comments about websites being down I realized this was much bigger than an email issue.
They never contacted anyone to inform of what was going on, but on a Facebook post they told everyone to be patient. They’d get this resolved. They said (and I’m quoting here) “for those of you who are patient, we will be able to get your emails back. For those of you with no patience, we can get your email back online with a new server, but you will not be able to retrieve any emails.” This was 5 days in. To infer that people who needed to get their email back up and running had “no patience” was infuriating. We gave it 1 week total and then had to move forward to getting something back up and running.
The response we received was less than hopeful – ” Trust me we know how frustrating it would be to have email not working. We can go fast and furious at the request of our clients panic and possibly have an email server crash (we are extracting emails from a failed server) we can create delays, slow downloading times, etc. We have been advised by a 3rd party consultant that we hired to be slow and steady and steady ends up being faster.“
Now I don’t know about you, but the whole idea of “extracting emails from a failed server”, RAID failure, 3rd party consultants, and off site redundant backups seem like something that exists only in movies. Like when Mark Zuckerberg comes up with the algorithm for Facebook on his window, and has people up all night “coding”… I don’t even know what that is. It’s like an imaginary world that just goes on functioning and I have no idea how. All I knew was I needed my online business back up and running.
More information came trickling in, there were rumors that everyones websites were completely lost, and I filed another support ticket. I’ll let Harald from Bludomain’s technical support tell you the rest… “All database driven sites, including wordpress blogs need to be rebuilt. Unfortunately we are not wordpress based so we cannot do anything with wordpress for you. My strong recommendation is to get a new site set up and post up the most important content until the full site build can be completed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”.jpg)
After I cyberbullied Harald and told him I needed answers his reply came down to this…
1. The emails that we patiently waited for as they “slowly extracted from a failed server” were a farce. The emails we missed for 2 weeks were just gone and they wouldn’t help get the functionality of it up and going again for 3 days after my requests to move it to a new server.
2. The website – that we completely redid this winter – was gone. They offered to give me the template again “for free”. That’s actually not free, Harald. That’s replacing the one you recklessly lost.
3. and this is the one that really hurt – our blog (which was also completely redesigned this winter) was gone as well. Just. Like. That. 10 years. Gone. I’m still sick as I write that. This was the point where I have a complete mental breakdown and lay in the fetal position and just cry. Followed by getting physically sick and having panic attacks for a week. I definitely needed a minute.
There are so many reasons why this is upsetting – like Google no longer knowing we exist, like no longer having a portfolio of the body of work we’ve created over the past decade, like potential clients having nothing to look at and no way to contact, like our clients being upset without our email working, our old clients losing their post about their day… the list goes on and on.
But here’s what happened… our clients weren’t mad, but instead they shared how sorry they were. A couple different grooms even reached out to help and offered to help us build a new site. Our past clients sent me texts that said beautiful things like “The site may be gone, but we will never forget and your work is stored in special places all over.” Friends sent cards and texts. Strangers on the internet reached out with advice and help. All of a sudden we were surrounded with positivity and concern. The humanity just came pouring out. People simply showed up for us in the kindest of ways.
Then another thing happened. As I stopped crying and buried myself in rebuilding a site, I dug back through our years of hard drives (because unlike Bludomain.com, we do back up) and was reminded over and over again of the people we’ve come to know, the phenomenal days we’ve been witness to, and the business we have been able to build simply by capturing people in the best way we know how. I’m not bashful to say that I felt really, deeply proud. What we have created, what we have been able to give to others, and what we have accomplished is truly extraordinary. It’s a shame that it took the web version of the past 13 years disappearing to validate the importance of what we do – but sometimes it takes seeing things in the rearview mirror to see it for what it is. .jpg)
Am I still pissed about what happened? Ha! I can’t even repeat the words that have come to mind – or been said out loud – every day in my house. Bludomain – in the words of my gal Taylor Swift “I’ve got a list a names and yours is in red, underlined. Isn’t cool, no, I don’t like you.”
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But we move forward feeling stronger, unruffled, more confident and ready to take on the next 13 years. So let’s do this! Let’s build a new blog together!! You have the party, we’ll bring the cameras and tell the story!
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Thank you so much for being here, we hope you’ll come back often!
