By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette

Wednesday, July 16, 2008, 11:50 a.m. -- A failed network switching device at a New York web hosting company put hundreds of web sites off-line Monday afternoon -- including the Nelson County Gazette -- for more than 40 hours.

The trouble at the web host company's data center was quickly isolated; the problem, according to the hosting company's status web page, was locating replacement device.

All the web sites hosted by the company went off-line at about 4 p.m. Monday. A new network switch was ordered Tuesday morning, though the fastest the company could get one was early this morning. The new switch was installed and all sites were available again at about 10:30 this morning.

During the outage, the only parts of the Gazette that were still available was the News Break Fire Report and Jim's Blog, both of which are blogging accounts hosted by a separate company.

As a result of the extended outage, the Gazette web site is being moved to a new hosting company with a record of strong customer service and support.