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The webteam would like to apologise to anyone who could not access the Hodnet website yesterday afternoon and evening (Tuesday, 7th Oct 2014).
The loss of service was beyond our control and out of the hands of our domain host. It was not some high tech fault which put the website off-line, but a simple mistake when someone at the data centre turned off the wrong server! They then began to reformat that computer and wipe out all the data belonging to the Hodnet site and many others. Our domain host immediately swung into action and everything was finally restored by the early hours of this morning.
For those interested here is an excerpt from a fuller explanation sent to us by our domain host:

Date sent: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 03:11:20
Dear customer,
During October 7th, as you will have noticed, all websites and email on our main shared webserver have been unavailable since approximately 1pm, in some cases until an hour or two ago. (All services are now back up and running).
Astonishingly, the data centre whose racks our server is housed in, whilst intending to format a server positioned in the rack next to ours, identified the wrong server. They wiped our machine clean. Though we were in direct contact with them within 3 minutes of them powering the machine off, it was already too late. They had already begun formatting it, and the data could not be recovered.
Upon realising the error, they immediately installed two new hard drives, and we began the process of rebuilding all data and services on this server from the data in our backup system.
The only bright spot has been that the backup system has been working perfectly, and the rebuilding process has been without any hitches so far. It has taken plenty of time because the amount of data and number of services is considerable. Services for sending and receiving emails (POP, IMAP and SMTP) have been back up since approximately 7.30 p.m. on October 7th .(Whilst this server was down, incoming email was queueing on a backup server. It has since all been delivered.) Access to websites was restored a few minutes before sending this email.
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