First thanks for all your patience, I recieved 407 emails from ‘readers’ to tell me I had a site problem – it lasted just a few hours short of seven days – sorry I couldn’t reply to you all, I was trying to focus my corresondence on fixing the problem:

So how about a little advice to web-hosts?

• When the connection to databases fails on a server, it would be best let all the people housed on that server know by (mass) email, do not do nothing. Afterwards try to avoid the following:
• Do not wait 2 days to reply to user’s increasingly frustrated requests for info
• Do not tell users that their lack of website has been assigned ‘medium priority’
• After user has emailed the managing director to find out what is happening, do not reply saying ‘what do you expect, we don’t work weekends’
• Do not say that there will be a solution ‘today, or tomorrow – if it works’ and when it doesn’t work say nothing (again)…

They fixed it this morning, it took ~7 days. If anyone wants to offer me a great deal on a QUALITY windows hosted environment together with a MySQL database, drop me a line.
Cheers and thanks again
Bill