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A good question! We’re still reeling from the shock this end so to put you in the picture!

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Last Sunday we received an email from the hosting company that stores the Writelink sites to say that he was closing down due to major health problems. We were told that all fees had been paid until the end of September leading us to assume that we had the rest of the month to make alternative arrangements.

Without warning on the 12th September, just after lunch time he shut down his servers taking Writelink and a great many other sites with him!

Frustrating and annoying as this was, it should only have caused a few hours inconvenience while the site was uploaded to a new web host which we’d already got prepared.

What we hadn’t realised was that our database backups were corrupted which means we cannot restore the most recent backups. Our programmer is still looking at restoring a much older backup, so we will hopefully have more on that later in the day.

As we don’t know yet whether this is possible, or even worth it, we’re looking at other alternatives. Namely, accelerating the development of the blog site.

The small ray of sunshine in this catastrophe is that our programmer has had a development site up and running to test modifications before applying them to the live site. He has made this live on our new web host server and is what you are now using. He still has some adjustments to make so please be patient with any bugs.

Of course there are a lot of posts missing so please feel free to add them back to your blogs. You will also have to re-upload your avatars in most instances.

Some parts of Writelink, such as our open competitions, Xmas Chillers, Battle of the Bards etc, did not depend upon a database so these will be back up and running shortly.

We will have to start again with the latest Arena competition, but that has only been open 3 days so there should not be too much lost there. The previous competition should be O.K. too as the judge is advised to take entries off the site for judging.

I will be sending out a newsletter to the whole membership to explain what has happened once I have more information regarding the old backup database.

Next time I’m coming back as an amoeba!