WE ARE BACK!!!!

If you tried visiting the blog over the past few days, you probably noticed that THERE WAS NO BLOG and freaked out.

We understand the feeling. Believe us. On Tuesday, our old server simply suspended our account without any notice because our blog was getting too much traffic and was making the entire server slow. Mayhem!Chaos!Terror! ensued as you might imagine.

For the past couple of years, we’ve had problems with our old hosting provider, but figured that since we have so much data, transferring would be a nightmare of a task, and we were willing to deal with crappy service in the name of preserving sanity. Up until last week, a shared server had worked well for us, and everything was going along swimmingly. But then, beginning Sunday evening, disaster struck.

Dear readers, we have grown.

We have grown so much in terms of visitors (thank you, everyone, for that!) that we now need to have our own dedicated server. Our account with what quite possibly could be the WORST hosting service in the world was suspended and locked down – and for the past few days, we’ve been frantically trying to find a new home. There was a good deal of blood, sweat and, yes, tears involved in the process – but we have FINALLY sorted everything out. The Book Smugglers is back on track, with what is hopefully better, faster, more reliable service. [1. Ana’s Note: And when I say “we” I really mean “Thea” who is the tech genius behind the Smugglers’ enterprise. Can we please ALL HAIL THEA!!!!!][2. Thea’s Note: And ALL HAIL ANA for holding down the twitter feed, emails, and helping explain the situation to concerned readers in the meantime!]

Anyways! We will resume regular blogging from tomorrow with our usual Sunday Stash post. We will have to re-schedule some of the posts we were supposed to have done last week, including the Nebula Readathon who was supposed to have happened today. Further details will follow tomorrow.

For now, just a few more bits and pieces. Because of this change to a new dedicated server, we are unfortunately incurring on unexpected monthly costs that we can’t afford for long and we will be looking for sponsors soon. This is a decision that was not made lightly and we hope our readers will understand. We’ve resisted ads for so long, because we don’t want any perception/accusation out there that we have conflicts of interest with regards to reviewing, or that we write about certain hot topics to garner more traffic. We promise that we will maintain our integrity as reviewers and will NOT accept any crappy spamtastic ads for cameras or whatever unrelated products. We will also be including affiliate links to our reviews and radar posts from now on and we would really appreciate your help! If you read one of our posts and decide to buy the book online, it would be awesome if you would consider do so using the links we provide.

We have had a hard week, dear readers. For a moment there, we despaired[3. Thea’s Note: Staying up until 2am each night dealing with hosting providers’ terrible customer service “support” desks, finding a new host, and then migrating the databases and tens of thousands of images we have, figuring out the DEVIL that is SQL…well, let’s say it wasn’t a fun week. Although, one does get an interesting sense of nostalgia/trends while going through every single file we’ve created. I am amused and very pleased that for every month of the year, we have uploaded at LEAST one zombie-related image. How awesome is that?] and wondered, but thanks to the power of awesome wikis, codecies, and some truly awesome blogging buddies that offered advice (here’s looking at you, Kristen, Jane of Dear Author, and everyone on Twitter!), we have prevailed. Despite the terrible experience that was this week, the hardest thing about it all was how much we MISSED blogging. We missed it like hell. We missed writing, we missed YOU, and we missed your comments.

It’s good to be back.

Ana and Thea