The site is now up and running, and the following is the explanation from the Hosting provider:

"As you are probably aware, 1&1 experienced a major problem with the server your website is hosted on in the last few days.

I am writing you today to personally apologize for the prolonged downtime which you experienced. Please allow me to explain what happened and what measures we have already added to prevent something like this from happening again in the future.

- On Thursday 10/18/06 the RAID system of the server had a major filesystem problem. Unfortunately, all attempts to fix the filesystem failed thus requiring a complete reinstall of the operating system. At no time was any customer data lost or jeopardized.

- Reinstalling the machine and restoring the configuration from the systemstate-backup went very quickly and without any problems. However, when attempting to restore the Internet Information Server (IIS) configuration file (MetaBase), our engineers encountered a major problem.

- This was raised to a Priority A Case to Microsoft who agreed with our engineers' assessment that the only remedy would be reinstalling IIS and then re-creating each configuration for every site. This, unfortunately, is a very slow process which ended up taking until early Monday morning.

We have now analyzed the issue and devised two steps which will enable us to restore the MetaBase within a very short period of time if the need ever arises again. We will be running a full trial of this new system next week to verify the concept and integrate it in our recovery plan.

Additionally, we made changes to our communication and reaction policies to make sure you will be better informed in the future.

Considering the amount of time our services were unavailable to you, we will credit three month's hosting to your account in the next few days, which will result in the date of your next bill being pushed back three (3) months. Please note that any additional items, such as domains will continue their normal billing cycle.

We thank you for your understanding and your patience. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us anytime.

Sincerely

Sebastian Moser

Director

Customer Services

1&1 Internet Inc.

1-877-435-7281"