This Blog Has Been Removed

Yes that was the message I got when I logged on to see my blog yesterday.
The blog had disappeared from the face of google. Was not even appearing on searches. Neither on my dashboard.
When a scheduled post did not appear on my email, I got suspicious and logged on to the blog. Imagine the shock. Colour draining from my face, stomach cramps and restlessness and crankiness and all that. I rooted around, did searches, mailed to friends to check the blog. Looked for the xml I had saved yonks ago and could find only a word document of posts.

And dear Monika called from Lavasa the moment she heard of it. So sweet of her. Like a mother hen she did lots of virtual clucking and hand holding and smsing into the evening and adviced me to go to bukvorm who put in a very strong word to those who matter. Soundest advice I guess as perhaps that worked because blogger forums had a very negative picture of getting back your blogs quickly.
Parallely I went to blogger help and posted a request to bring my blog back to life in their forum and also logged my blog name on their spreadsheet.
I called google and they assured me that going through the help forum is the surest and fastest way to get the blog back and that there is no contact person to whom I could voice my concerns.
Meanwhile Cee the expert put her head on to it and gave me lots of links to go through and offered a massive help to try and figure out things for me.
I bugged people, cried on their virtual shoulders, pestered everyone including the husband to work the magic through his team.
Friends mailed me asking about the site.
Thank you all of you for missing the blog as much as I did. I realised how important it is to me. Even though I have a back up of all posts on a word file and on email and comments on the email, it is really not the same - because the blog also is made of comments in real time. I couldn't possibly post back all comments on each post.
I agonised the entire night. And had vivid dreams of typing the url and finding my site back in action.
This morning I woke up and straight went onto the site. Voila, it was back.
The first thing what I did was-
Go to dashboard settings- basic- blogging tools
and Exported my blog onto an xml.
The xml took some time considering the years of work and loads of pics on them.
And then I made a private blog (yeah blogspot again as this seemed the simplest and quickest at that point of time) and imported this xml onto it. Being a private blog, it is not open to spam comments which could be a reason for blog removal or perhaps some maintenance issue where my site got caught.
Now I am evaluating a few options-
1. Put an alternate blog version on wordpress.
or
2. Go to my own domain.
What say readers?
Meanwhile as a standard operating protocol, I will back up my blog every week. And import it to the private blog.
Comment moderation would help? Atleast I can avoid spams being posted.
I went through my emails & spam comment inbox in blogger and rooted out spam comments and deleted them dilligently from the blog archives.
The world seems a happier place today.