At about 1100 EST (1600 GMT) yesterday, our web hosting company, A2 Hosting, suspended our web hosting account. They were responding to a huge spike in traffic due to a link from the IMDb homepage that brought our web server to a grinding halt. About 24 hours ago, I was told that the site was being moved to another server and would be back online in a matter of minutes.

What should have been a routine procedure fell victim to some unforeseen errors beyond my control, and I wasn’t kept in the loop. An outage that should have lasted minutes stretched into hours; hours stretched into a day. As of this morning, we’re back online.

I am certainly disappointed that we missed out on the surge in traffic, and consequently the opportunity to bring the Overthinking™ that you know and love to a new audience. I feel let down by A2, whose tech support was not really helpful yesterday — though this morning when a very, very nice server engineer named Jeremy fixed the problem in less than 5 minutes. (A2, if you’re reading this, give Jeremy a rasie.)

But I’m more concerned with you, our regular visitors and subscribers. We are extremely grateful to have you here; we enjoy reading and responding to your comments immoderately; we are thrilled when you recommend the site to friends. As the site’s webmaster, I apologize personally to you for the interruption of service. We’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ZRlqhPNSQ

–Matthew Wrather