No such thing as a free lunch.........

It's often said that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

I beg to differ.

Today PP and I attended a 'learning lunch' organised by our local 1066 business enterprise centre and it did indeed include a free lunch.  Not to mention a wealth of information on using social media for business which was useful, relevant and engaging.

Something of a win-win situation.

We came home energised, inspired and full of ideas for the new website, which is now just 20 days away from its launch.  PP, wearing her webmistress hat (a rather fetching poke bonnet if you must know) has been hard at work, completely redesigning and restructuring the old site, which will be unveiled on 1 November.  

So earlier this afternoon, when I heard anguished cries from the office, I hurried through from the workroom to discover what was amiss.  Apparently our new website had completely disappeared, along with the back-end, leaving a completely blank screen.  We both made a few abortive attempts to discover its whereabouts, without success.

Reasoning that it couldn't just have vanished into thin air, and suspecting a server outage, we checked our hosting provider's website to see what was going on, again to no avail.  Fortunately they have a 'chat to a real person' facility on their site, so PP quickly established that the problem was indeed with the server, which was down for over an hour undergoing emergency repairs.

After a nerve-wracking wait, the server did eventually get up and running, and thankfully the new website was restored, much to PP's relief, given the many, many hours she's spent on it thus far.

I don't really understand how the interweb works (does anyone?) so it's a constant source of amazement to me that emails go where they're supposed to, and that the entire knowledge of the world is available at the click of a mouse.  So servers, and their arcane workings are a complete mystery.  I usually just press 'Send' and hope for the best.

So I'm keeping everything crossed that we don't experience any further alarms and excursions.


Edit: I tried to find an interesting image of a server but they're all deadly dull and boring so you'll just have to conjure one up for yourself.