We apologise for any inconvenience caused during the migration of our website to a bigger, faster, server in our provider’s new data centre which took over a week to complete with hard backups, etc.
Last year (Sept 22) we had a horrifying situation where the server discs failed and the 3rd party backups failed which resulted in this website being offline for 5 weeks approx. It took tremendous effort to get the website back up again through sheer hard work and tenacity to get it back online and although the services provided over the past 10 years had been excellent, it again showed us the importance of self-reliance where backups are concerned.
The previous server that had caused the problem last year didn’t fully recover causing sporadic issues on the website, sometimes on the front end but more often in our administration area causing extra work.
It was expected to happen later in the year but given that our service provider announced their intention to move our server to a new data centre we didn’t want to be left in another hopeless situation as before.
Hopefully, now things will run smoothly again for a few years on a new machine and we can get back to our focus of bringing more great tools online for you all to enjoy.
Also now we have upgraded to a larger server, it should be even faster for customers and improve further the shopping experience now and in the future. It will also allow us to improve and explore ideas that the old dedicated server was restricted by its size limitations, compared to the new larger dedicated server machine.
Update: 26/05/2023
Finally, we have fixed all the bugs and solved a very frustrating BOT spam problem that plagued our incoming emails and false sign-ups which took much refinement so as not to affect genuine people using the website. This was one of the many tweaks and fixes but it finally looks like we are now fully operational on all browsers and devices.
Whilst this is more complex to run our own eCommerce system that isn’t sharing data or controls with corporate systems such as Shopify, Wix, etc, we feel our customer’s details and transactions deserve privacy. Note: You can always Identify these shared e-commerce systems usually in the footer (bottom) of the website.
