You can find some stunning figures for the reliability of the equipment employed to host websites. This can fill one with awe and wonder at the performance of modern technology.

That’s great until the day your website stops working. That’s a shock. What would be the high street equivalent? You arrive to open the shop as you have done for the last 7 years and find that the key won’t work in the lock? No, this is different. The shop has gone. It can’t be found. Instead, there’s a poster where the shop used to be saying something like, ‘ the shop that used to be here has gone. It cannot be found. If you are a member of the public wanting to have a look in the shop that was here, you may wish to write to the owners and tell them that their shop has gone’.

The good news is that, included in the deal to rent the shop, is an army of clever people who then proceed to work their cotton socks off to replace the shop. Not only that, they then carefully replace all the stock exactly as it was, referring to something called their ‘disaster recovery backup’. Understandably, this takes time, but with lots of shops to replace it would wouldn’t it?

So, the fretful owner waits on the pavement, hands in pockets, collar turned up against the chill wind, until, joy! just 24 hours later, the shop is back, perfect in every detail, just as he left it. To those customers and visitors who were affected by this event, we apologise.