"We're sorry about the current downtime. We know some of you are frustrated, so we thought we'd take a moment to explain why this happened. "Running a web serv

"We're sorry about the current downtime. We know some of you are frustrated, so we thought we'd take a moment to explain why this happened. "Running a web server is very expensive. After we've built the site, if we want to keep it running, someone needs to be on-call 24 hours a day. That means at least one full-time staff member who does nothing else-- more if we want them to stay sane. "To save us and you some money, we've contracted maintenance of our servers out to a third-party service. This is great for us, since they run it more reliably than we could, and it's great for you, because it costs a lot less. But the downside is that things still break sometimes, and when they do, it's completely out of our hands. We're left waiting for things to get fixed just like you are. "So we understand your frustration; we're frustrated too. But unfortunately, downtimes do happen. Guaranteeing our service 100% of the time would cost hundreds of thousands of extra dollars per year, and for most of our users, that's simply not worth the cost. Our provider guarantees 99.[nines]% reliability for much less money, and this is the 0.01%. "If you have something that absolutely must get done, shoot us an email right now and we'll take care of it for you as soon as the site is active again. "Although this is technically out of our hands, we aren't trying to shift the blame; we made this decision with open eyes, and we stand by that decision. Again, we sincerely apologize for the temporary inconvenience. We hope we can make it up to you with some new features we'll be rolling out this month :)" It doesn't have to be that hard.