It was quite an interesting day yesterday at PoolDawg's worldwide headquarters.  I was roused out of a peaceful slumber early yesterday morning by an automated text saying the PoolDawg's servers were down.  After a little research, we were able to determine that our host, the powerful Amazon EC2 Cloud service, had what the press is referring to as "a hiccup". Like many online companies, PoolDawg is hosted in what is commonly referred to as a cloud server environment.  Among the folks that live in our cloud are Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite and a ton of other companies.  The reasons to do it are scalability, reliability and it is much more affordable than some of the other hosting options that provide 99.95% uptime.  This of course is the irony of the story, as the cloud went down making our site unreachable for a good part of the day yesterday. Needless to say, our technology partners at Acumium were able to get us back up and running without any loss of data.  That said, I'd like to apologize to all of our loyal customers who weren't able to get anything more than a system maintenance page yesterday.  We're already in the process of looking at options to put redundancy in place to ensure this doesn't happen again. Thank you to everyone for your patience yesterday.  If anyone has any questions about this, feel free to email me directly at mike[at]pooldawg.com or just give us a call at 866-843-3294.