Sorry about the downtime, our data center had a major hardware failure and it took them about 36 hours to repair and bring the site back up. No data or orders were lost fortunately. Meanwhile we’ve been keeping ourselves busy shipping outstanding orders, and preparing a surprise new product ready for launch in a few more days. Sorry for the inconvenience and worry this might have caused, but we’re happy to report everything is back to normal now.

BTW, as many of you noticed, during any unplanned downtime you can follow our Twitter account where you’ll get frequent updates.

Our “Frequent Flyer Program” is officially broken. We are aware that for many of our customers the program has worked perfectly, but many others report that it is not working properly, if at all. We don’t know why this is. This is a known bug but the French developer of our shopping cart software can not be persuaded to address the bug any time soon, so we will temporarily remove the FF program at the end of June. If you have collected any FF points, we recommend you redeem them before the end of June. We will reinstate the FF program just as soon as we have a bug fix from the developer. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’d like to ask all our customers to bear with us – we’re still running 2 to 4 days late on shipping orders out, so you may wait an extra day before we can collect your payment, and another day or two before we ship. Plans are afoot to massively scale our sales capacity, but it’s going to take us several more weeks to implement.

One thing which is not helping at the moment is our webhost, who has taken it upon themselves to “protect” us from spammers. They are blocking all system messages to and from known spammer hangouts, ie, all domains ending with @aol.com, @live.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, @msn.com and several others. If you have been getting “Administratively denied” error messages on our site, that’s why. We have several plans to work around this, including moving hosting altogether as a last resort. We’ll roll out these updates over the coming week or two. In the mean time, if you get one of these errors, please just contact us via replying to one of our system emails, or via our contact form, as our email is on a totally different system than the website and has no such issues with “spammer domains”.

Lastly, our public key has been changed, if you use PGP, please update your key now.

UPDATE 27 May: Still massively backed up, but all outstanding orders will ship on or before this weekend. Sorry again for the delays. We’re still working on the webhosting issues and we may be forced to take the site offline intermittently for maintenance over the coming days.

UPDATE 28 May: Our website will go offline for a few hours today while we move to a new server and new IP address. No need to panic, we’re working hard so that we can serve you all better.

UPDATE 29 May: All outstanding orders have been shipped as of today.

During the past couple weeks we’ve had tremendous response from new customers and old customers alike. Unfortunately we are understaffed at the moment and we are not able to handle the load.

It is very important to us that we are able to ship all orders in a timely manner, and to be able to reply to all our customer’s queries. Further, we have a lot of new products under development and we need time to attend to that too. So after a lot of consideration we have decided to close our shop to new customers. However, this is only a temporary measure.

This closure does not affect existing customers. If you are an existing customer, just log into our site as usual and complete your order.

If you are a new customer and you want to complete your order with us, we don’t want to turn you away. So we plan to open our site for new customers every few days, for several hours at a time, maybe even as long as a day or two, then we will close registrations again. You will need to be a little persistent and remember to check every once in a while. The items in your shopping cart will remain there until you are able to register.

We apologize for the inconvenience.