My Website Was Stolen

Earlier this week, I felt my phone buzz and saw that it was a text from Courtney. It said: “Hey! I don’t think your website is up anymore.”

My first thought was: I got hacked. I typed in my URL and what came up next was an obscure news website. Definitely not my blog.

After about 10 minutes of digging and a few phone calls later, I realized my domain name had expired and had been auctioned off to the highest bidder. I wanted to simultaneously cry and kick myself.

I don’t depend on my blog to feed my family, but it is meaningful to me.

My first post was in 2014 — just 2 years short of a decade ago. I started it to simply share about my faith and my family. Since then, I’ve written about becoming a dad for the first time, marriage, taking a step of faith to move our family to North Carolina to be a part of Elevation Church, confronting racism, finding hope in a hospital room, and more.

My goal for my blog has always been simple. Teach others whatever God is teaching me.

Writing is sort of like therapy for me. I guess that’s why I’m writing this now. And I did learn a few lessons from this whole website “theft” thing.

Lesson #1

If something is important to you, take responsibility for it and take it seriously. Some weird glitch happened and I never got any expiration emails. But I also had never written down when the renewal date was or set a reminder for it. I had left it up to “the system.” Big mistake.

Lesson #2

When you drop the ball and make a mistake, do what you can to correct it. Once I found out what happened, I contacted my website hosting company, called a website reseller company, I looked up who purchased it, and I even personally reached out to buy it back. I doubt they’ll respond, but I did all I could. Which leads me to Lesson #3…

Lesson #3

Sometimes, after you’ve done all you can do — it still won’t be enough. When that happens, I think it’s best to take a step back and ask the question “why.” In this case, why did I care so much about the domain name? I realized it wasn’t the domain as much it was the stories. That helped me know what to do next. After a little research, I realized I could still access all of my blog posts. I then took them and transferred them to a new domain — tylerspeegle.me — problem solved.

And that’s where we’re at today. I’m not happy that it happened, but I did learn a few valuable lessons. If I had never moved on from Lesson #1, I would’ve never made it to Lesson #3, and I might would’ve never recovered all of the posts I’ve written and hope to share with my kids one day.

In the past, I’ve been guilty of staying stuck in the “kick myself” phase. But what I’m learning is the faster you can move on from that, the quicker you can move on to whatever God has next.

Whatever you’re facing these days, I hope this inspires you to move past Lesson #1. There are plenty more lessons to be learned, but you have to keep moving in order to keep learning.