Did you have a great festive season? Were you totally over it before Santa even parked his sleigh on your rooftop? Both things can be true. It turns out it really is possible to have too much of a good thing.

I did not have that problem, however, having spent New Year’s Eve under the bonnet of the Flat Chat website trying to solve a problem that my soon-to-be-former internet hosts had created but insisted was my fault.

The plan was and still is to make Flat Chat faster and more reliable by hosting it on a Virtual Private Server (whatever that is). Except someone at the company who had assured me this could all be done quickly and painlessly (if more expensively) forgot to change a setting and all my websites crashed for a day.

Meanwhile I waited for hours for their help desk to respond to my pleas for advice and assistance and then tweaked settings and ran around switching modems on and off at their behest.

Now bear in mind that this was not some cheap and overly cheerful off-shore entity run by people with reassuringly ordinary names and suspiciously inauthentic American accents (that was the web designers who crashed the website a month ago).

This was one of the pricier service providers, based right here in Australia. Not that any of that should concern you.

Thankfully there wasn’t much happening on the strata front so we only lost one story and a couple of posts to the forum (which will be restored when Flat Chat is in its new home) so the only real damage was to my emotional wellbeing.

And the upshot is that I am changing hosting platforms so there might be a few hours this weekend when Flat Chat is offline. It’ll probably be fine and if not it will only be a matter of hours. And the weekly newsletter will be back next Friday too.

Meanwhile, if you post a message on the forum it WILL appear, eventually. If it doesn’t turn up immediately it’s because it’s waiting for me to approve it. I have to do that manually to prevent the Forum from being swamped by spam, abuse, sneaky ads and other internet nasties.

So please, keep sending us your questions and answers and we’ll push them through as quickly as possible.  Thank you for your patience.

This was originally sent out last week with our newsletter – you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter below.