24 hours ago I realised that HistoryReviewed had been down for about 3 hours. The problem was that my database died and could not be started. I have never actually seen such a problem in 13 years of using this type of technology – both at work and on my own websites.

I have asked a supporter and his dad to take a closer look. They’re by "boffins" whom I turn to when I need additional help. I would like to know if my server was compromised or whether something else happened.

Currently it seems to be some kind of internal problem that occurred.

So I went and had to create a new server on the fly. It took me several hours, because I’m no expert at this. But I’m a lot more organised than I was before.

HistoryReviewed and White-Shop.biz are both up fine. AfricanCrisis.info is also up, but for me in South Africa AfricanCrisis is not "visible".

I was UNPREPARED for a sudden outage of this scale where the machine is unworkable and all the websites are down. That was quite freaky. But I’m quite pleased with my fixes.

As long as there was no compromise that caused the problem, then I hope things will be ok.

I must say all the malware and hacking of earlier this year sure came in handy. I had most of my processes in better shape.

So it’s been a real nuisance and I’ve spent all day looking at other finer details and checking things and liaising with technical people.

What a nuisance. But that’s life and at least I’m getting ever more organised!!!!

It was a good exercise.