It's not that I haven't tried to write something here lately. Indeed, I have. I ended up saving the whole thing to a text file on my desktop, because our servers weren't cooperating. (I'll upload the other post shortly).

What happened you ask? Why was it that everytime you visited in the last several days, all you saw was vast nothingness or dire errors?

I asked the same pointed questions while on the phone with webhost's tech support early yesterday afternoon. I called to find out if their CF server was on the fritz. This, incidentally, was the first time in the two years we've hosted with them that I've called their 800 number to bother them.

I asked The Guy what the deal was, why weren't we getting our CF pages, but our html was fine? He looked into the problem (put me on hold) and discovered that our account was "on the old datacenter, and the ColdFusion server on that datacenter had reliability issues." He said that he could have our account setup on the new datacenter.

I don't know what a "datacenter" is. I imagine it's a cluster of Compaq portable computers connected by parallel ports and powered by sled dogs on a tread mill. The server is a narcoleptic tuxedoed man with my webpages on a silver tray, hence the "reliability issues".

Anyways, The Guy said they would move our account at no charge.

At no charge you say? Well fine then, since you're not hosting our pages for free anyways. I mean, what am I paying these people for anyways?

I didn't even argue with The Guy when he told me that I would have to make a backup of everything we wanted to keep, and then upload everything again when the new account was ready.

I asked how long I had to pull everything down. The Guy, stymied by my question, told me I'd better start right away.

So, after several hours of FTP'ing, I had everything backed up on my harddrive. I guess it was just in time too, because just after I'd finished, I went back and discovered that there was nothing left.

I waited for Kris to get home - they had sent the new login information to his email.com address. We immediately attempted to reinstate all of our email addresses (my only non-hotmail account, the email address I actually use!) and mailing lists. Outlook would not cooperate. After wrestling with that for a while, and finally getting it to work, I started uploading our files.

I get the lounge uploaded, and then kris's files. Hit the site, and discover I've got to have all our DNSs reestablished. I submitted a support ticket, and 12 hours later we're back in business.

In the meantime, Kris' inbox has been hit pretty hard by the recent scourge of worm viruses. Haven't decided if it's because of the new email server or what, but he's been getting messages with the virulent attachment at about 1 per minute.

So, start to finish, we've been down for about three days now, from the time we developed "reliability issues" until the time we could see our website again. Will resume normal posting schedule very soon.