Reply from the GS forum:

Basically  i lost the  dns servers.
For those that don't understand when you enter an address in the browser the request is sent to name servers that resolve that address into an ip address of where the site is located.  Without your name servers you have no site or email server functioning. This meant i could not let you know why the site was down. I had to reinstall on new servers and register them on the global network which can take up to 48 Hours. Usually just a few hours though.
The name servers are not on the same server as the actual website, and you do have backup name servers unlucky for me i lost both.
As soon as i have time i will send a newsletter to all giving full details of what happened and why.

Everything is fine now except  the fact that images are not getting sold.

This paragraph I found rather amusing:

I hope to address this issue again the newsletter will tell you how.
I can't post it on the forum.Smile

What he probably means is that the dog actually ate it, or the server fell from the kitchen table, but he doesn't want Google to pick it up 
Disclaimer: this is just a friendly joke.

Clean, fast, simple... just a small advice: your mailto is open there for the bots. I hope you have a good spamfilter 

When I registered first from within Belgium, I always got thrown back at their French page. Now we know France. They think they are God's Gift to Europe and everybody should speak French, especially Belgium, but I don't understand French technical lingo well. And Belgium is 2/3 Flemish and it speaks Dutch. It didn't work. I cleaned cookies... I was always thrown back at the French .fr site. So I abandoned my account.

When I passed by some Arab country (that isn't blessed enough to speak French); I made a new account, and yoohoo, I got on the .com, even when back in Belgium.

Then I lost my password once and I couldn't get on. I requested the 'lost password - send email' but the email never arrived. Support never replied. So I left the site for half a year. Then, I posed as a new customer with a 'sales inquiry' to get their attention. I got a reply that my password was changed to... guess.... 'fotolia'. I guess hackers would never find a difficult password like that  .

All goes well now. I started uploading again and all goes well. IMy account gets $$$ but I'm basically scared about their security.

I just talked to hospitalera. It seems they run a server from home. Anything might have happened... a fire, the PC fell off the table, the dog ate it ;-) - no worries...

For a business things like that are deadly of course. My own site(s) run on a shared host in a datacenter with full backup, and I'm just a poor amateur. In my medic training (I used to be a dive instructor) we were told that the brain is gone after 3 mins without oxygen. Better start respirating the victim before 2 mins passed. I guess GS is right at 2.5 mins by now....

Another one bites the dust?

Is there anything I should do/worry about?

Apart from Richard selling your shots on a CD door to door or on Ebay, nothing at all ;-)
Hospitalera should know more about it. I think she is connected in some way to the site. It's probably a server hickup.

It would also mean that Shutterstock is considerably more profitable than I estimate.

iStock started from nothing and was sold to Getty for 50 million dollars a couple of years later. That's where the money is going to. Not to marketing, not to contributors, but to Getty that has to get its 50 million back - with interest. Getty doesn't win much, the current iStock people don't win much. The original founder(s) won much, and they count their greenbacks in the Bahamas with a big smile, Champagne and caviar on the table and a fat cigar in their mouth. It's that simple. The sweat of the Photoshoppers and shooters gets converted into caviar. Such is the magic of Capitalism. Correct me if I'm wrong; economy was never my best side 

Apart from the fact that I don't see the connection between sexual orientation and religion, this is (at least for a while) 2007, and a support site (I'm not talking about porn) for gay youth is as decent as a support site for farmers with tax problems, housewives with faulty appliances, or people with a medical condition. I thought bigotry stopped with the dawning of the age of Aquarius? ;-)

About 10% of the population wherever is not-so-straight, and it is a huge market, as Ellen spelled out in one of her blogposts on Dreamstime. Of course, a model can be used in a slanderous way, but that doesn't have anything to do with the orientation of the site.

If your model wants to act for RF stock, you should spell out that he/she has no control over the use, nor over the modifications of his/her photo. Modeling is just like acting in this respect: everybody knows an actor is not the character he plays.

What about muslims that don't want to appear on catholic websites or vice versa, vegetarians that don't want to appear on a Mc Donalds ad, macho men that don't want to be used in a womens mag?

Either you model for RF stock, or you don't. Nobody forces your model to model I suppose? If he/she wants control over the use, he/she should model for RM, or better, not model at all.

But if your model has second thoughts, me thinks it's only fair and kind to deactivate his shots on all sites and tear the contract apart. I had a similar case last year and I immediately deactivated the shots on DT. Since that incident, I clearly spell out to the models (who are also friends) the implications of the contract, included the "gay" issue. In my experience, models (especially teens) are very eager to model, but can't foresee all the legal consequences very well.

I'm absolutely baffled.  They couldn't even give half of these images away in the free section.   http://www.fotolia.com/id/5344418

Come on bud, at least there is no frontal flash with nice crisp shadows on the wall used 

I have about 10-12 images there (last time I checked some were still pending) and got one sale that earned me US$4.90.

I uploaded 4 shots last September, then forgot. Woken up by an email in November I sold one > 7$ for me. Wow! I'm going to take them serious and send a DVD with 500 shots soon.

I am going to try and get in to Alamy, and have a question on upsizing.
My current workflow is RAW  - Tiff - save as jpeg.
I will upsize the images as a tiff file then save as jpeg, but I normally delete the tiff, and just keep the RAW and jpeg images.

I do the same as you, but I always save the TIFF. You know, postprocessing means a lot of work (at least to me): setting levels, pop-up, isolate, selective noise-reduction, cloning out skin defects (models) or brand/logo names (public shots). The 16-bit TIFF is your capital, your eggs. The 8-bit lossy JPGs are the omelet you serve. Nobody can make eggs again from omelet. Imagine you forgot to clone out a brand name. Start all over from raw?

The 16-bit TIFF is always my central item. For Alamy, I upsize my D200 10MP shots 135% (bicubic smoother, best for upsize, PS CS3), then convert to 8bit and JPG. Make sure it's 300DPI. Got 100% acceptance at Alamy (till now). Expect a month to accept your shots.

This is one of the great advantages of FP. I sold one photo there since my last post, but whenever someone want to buy a photo, you can do it through FP. I upload to 10 different agencies, and FP is one of only four that have never rejected anything I uploaded.

FP is not your average agency where you upload and then have to sit on the sidewalk waiting. If a site like that suddenly decides to add subscription and sell your 10MP shots for 30 cents, nothing you can do about it.

FP gives you load of tools to manage your own sales. You can set your prices and license types. For me, it takes off the burden to do direct sales, add a shopping cart to my site, check my email daily. Let FP handle it, and you get 70%.

And of course, you can treat FP just like any other RF site. Uploading is fast and easy, like on LO. One click can do, a few more if you need to attach a MRF. The difference between FP and LO (for me) was 8x more sales (dollarwise) at FP than at LO.

A final note: don't be shy to set your shots at 10$. A customer that finds the right shot doesn't really care about 1$ or 10$. The first shot that I set at 10$ sold a couple of hours later. Made me smile since Shutterstock rejected it as not commercial.

My 2008 goal is to keep a lower profile than I did during 2007. I enjoy sharing my experiences and participating in this community, but I think I'd be further ahead if I bit my tongue more often.

Please don't. You are my favorite poster, and with a sharp mind.

My goals are basically to enhance time input vs. yield ratio in stock. I have been putting far too much input in postprocessing, uploading, categorizing to too much sites that don't deliver. I quit LO recently and more will come. I stopped uploading already to iStock, CanStock, Snapvillage, Geckostock and all the "new" sites. My last batch to iStock took me a day going through all their disambiguation crap. Not for 200$ = 160 Euro per year. That's just 20 hours of flipping hamburgers.

I will also stop submitting to sites that sell my shots for 0.25$. It's a disgrace. I'd rather post them on Flickr for free, what the heck. If I would have spent the time uploading/categorizing to CanStock in the past 2.5 years just flipping hamburgers, I would have made 10 times as much. An exception is ShutterStock that makes up by volume what they lack on pay per sale. I just wish they paid me in Euro (as they charge their European customers) because the falling Dollar sucks big time.

I need to concentrate more on isolated and studio shots, both food/objects and models. I have a studio space ready in my second home in SE Asia but I need softboxes and light tents. The ceiling-bounced flash just doesn't give me enough DOF and overexposed backdrops will reduce the isolation work to 5 mins. Plenty of free models there. Having the studio, I need to shift to commissioned shoots and events of fat ugly rich ladies with broken teeth, cloning out their pimples, play digital dentist, change their horizontal aspect ratio and perform Photoshop-facelifts. I will cry all my way to the bank.

I'm going to concentrate more on sites that give a higher yield per photo, like Alamy, Featurepics, Photoshelter, Zymmetrical. One sale at FP on average equals 20 sales at ShutterStock.

I want to emulate Phildate with mass production of mindless goodlooking Asians with plastic smiles, headsets and laptops 
I got a guy trained in tagging and postproducing. He costs me 300php = 5 Euro per work day but for that price he cooks, cleans and shops too. I want to emulate Yuri Arcurs with gorgeous guys and girls in business suits gazing clumsily over a flipchart and pointing success, yeah! 

And when all that works, I'll wander off in nature again on my motorcycle, to my beloved waterfalls and sunsets and landscapes, cityviews, people in public, things I really like ;-)
I wasn't born as a businessman.