It wasn’t looking good for a while and I began to think that the site couldn’t be restored. Initially, all the content after March 2023 was missing. I requested that the website hosting company restore the site from backups, but the daily, weekly and monthly backups all brought up errors when they were restored. Finally, I fixed the errors on the Jan 9th monthly restore but almost a month’s data was missing.

I had the hosting company restore the weekly backup of Jan 30, and did some tweaking to get the plugins (additional functions added to the site) to play well. Whew…

This made me realize that the site has been up for 10 years. It started as a way for me to keep my technical skills up, and share some oama / papio catch reports and tips. Along the way, the cost of running a website has gone up significantly because now I need to protect the site from hackers, malware, and pay extra to view usage analytics because the number of daily views passed a threshold. Because of this recent problem with data disappearing, I now have to pay for a premium data backup and restore service I can operate myself. The total cost to run the website safely is close to $1,000 a year. No wonder there aren’t any small time, non-commercial fishing blogs anymore.

The site has been a knowledge base of tips and how-tos, fully supported by Holoholo writers who have filled in the many gaps in my fishing experience. It would be a shame to have this information disappear one day. Maybe I can eventually archive the site to one that becomes static and requires very minimal hosting services?

For now, the proceeds from the licensing of the shark video have helped cover operating costs. Mahalo nui loa for supporting the website over the years.