realmaverick - 12:47 pm on Nov 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Good afternoon guys. Thanks so much for all your advice and support.

Today we received confirmation of total data loss. Myself, my team and my members are all devastated. Unfortunately the host didn't have any additional backups. They trawled through all their personal backups the entire night, but due to the size of the website, it was deleted shortly after it was confirmed it wasn't needed.

It's extremely hard to come to terms with. Years, thousands of hours of work, 2 million members, galleries full of members art, their profiles they had so much pride in, all gone.

The host have said, the hacker deleted the data in a way that made data recovery impossible. He targeted our main servers, development servers and backup servers. Apparently a hack to this degree is very rare.

My team are wonderful, passionate and loyal. They want to start again. The members have been sending in tons of support, begging us to rebuild.

Finally, my host has kindly suspended our billing for the foreseeable future, to help us with our recovery. As the servers cost thousands a month, I doubt many hosts would have been so quick to offer their support.

Thanks again to all of you. I will keep you updated with any developments.