Except sit and wait for the people who know what to do actually do it.

That’s what happened to Snorestore today.

The Snorestore website (www.snorestore.co.uk) was running fine and dandy, ticketyboo and all other silly cliches, until midnight last night. But by 6am, things had gone totally pear-shaped.

You could still *see* the website. You just couldn’t order anything from it.

It was the dreaded “500: internal Server Error,” the kind of problem which strikes terror into the hearts of website managers because almost always, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

And so it was in this case. It turned out – as we suspected early on – that our hosting company (so tempted to name and shame them) had implemented a disastrous tweak to their main servers overnight, rendering countless thousands of websites useless. Rather like going into town and finding all the shops you were planning visit were closed for staff training.

So we did the only thing we could do: we put up notices on the home page and mini banners on all the other pages telling people to contact us by phone. We broadcast it on Twitter and spent lots of time on software forums joining in the general moans. We also drank many, many cups of tea.

Eventually, at around 5 o’clock this evening, the hosts flicked a switch or screwed a widget in a bit more tightly and the website kicked into life again. Big sighs of relief all round.

By way of thanks for their patience (some would call it a bribe), we’ve just sent out an email newsletter to all our customers who have subscribed to our updates, offering them a discount if they order in the next three days. It’s the least we can do.

What, you mean you didn’t get the newsletter?