The clowns who host the site had a hardware failure: the server that was hosting Vlatitude had its hard drive corrupted. Were there backups? Yes, they made backups, but they were on the same drive. Wasn't there RAID mirroring? What they're telling the customers is that ours was the only server without RAID mirroring. Oops!

All of the site's important content - tutorials and the forum - were in a mySQL database on the defunct server. Although I am told that there are attempts to recover data and backups, I am also told that the chances of doing so are slim.

Needless to say, I am very disappointed with our host Dixiesys (www.dixiesys.com). About 2 years ago I transferred to them because they had a very inexpensive service. I guess you get what you pay for - unprofessional, unreliable, unbelievably inapt hosting. It is a bitter shame that a 5-year accumulation of knowledge has been erased due to simple incompetence.

I want to apologize to all of our visitors, our form regulars, and everyone and everyone. I had plans to keep Vlatitude going as long as people kept reading, but now with this crash, all the data that we have accrued over the years has perished with small chance of recovery. To all the people with @vlatitude.com e-mails - I would be happy to restore those, just e-mail your login and password to vladimir -at- vlat... -dot- com. (I kept a backup of all your settings when I first set them up, but guess where I kept them - that's right, on the server.)

I don't want to sound like there is no hope: there is definitely a chance of recovery, a possibility of reverting to an older version of our data. I am working on this as vigorously as I can. In fact, I think I have at least some of the data backed up from when we moved to a new server in February. I will of course keep everybody posted.