Government is hoping its web portal, which allows people to access departmental websites from one central site, will be running again early next week.

An overseas contractor flew in earlier this week to help with restoration of the portal which has been down since September 30.

Most Government informational websites are hosted on the portal and have been impacted but several are still running.

They can be accessed directly as well as via the www.gov.bm temporary page and from a link to the Bermuda yellow pages for Government listings.

Asked why some sites had been hit and not others a spokesman for the Minister of Energy, Telecommunications and e-Commerce said: "Some Government sites have been created using the Portal software, which was impacted by the server failure.

"Other Government sites are hosted on separate servers and linked from the portal, but can be accessed directly.

"Initially there was a problem with the spam software which then resulted in a problem receiving incoming emails but this was resolved by last Tuesday afternoon."

Some in the computer industry have questioned whether any of the missing information had been backed up given the length of time it has taken to rectify the problem.

The spokesman said: "There is a backup of the portal data, however the portal is a complex piece of software accessing very large volumes of data and implemented on a number of servers.

"The restoration process therefore is not a simple exercise and had to be carefully coordinated.

"The portal servers are stored in an industry standard virtual environment which has redundancy built in. Despite levels of redundancy this problem revealed a low level single point of failure in the system."

An expert from the Project Performance Corporation, the US partner which had helped set up the portal, is now helping out.

The Government spokesman said: "Current estimates indicate that internal testing will begin later this week leading to general availability early next week."

More than $1 million was put aside for the portal project in 2003 to bring together nearly 40 Government websites and it went live in May 2004.

It was relaunched in December 2005 with more interactive features.

Government claimed at that stage it was getting an average of 27,157 hits a day, mostly from overseas users who spend an average of 15 minutes online.

The sites that are not affected are:

Airport Operations www.bermudaairport.com

Attorney General www.bermudalaws.bm

Bermuda National Library www.bermudanationallibrary.bm

Consumer affairs www.ca.gov.bm

Education www.moed.bm

eTax www.etax.gov.bm

eTCD www.etcd.gov.bm

Land Valuation www.landvaluation.bm

Planning www.planning.gov.bm

Police www.police.bm

Registering .bm Addresses www.bermudanic.bm

Registrar of Companies www.roc.gov.bm

St. George’s Fire Service www.sgfb.bm

Tourism www.bermudatourism.com

Voter Registration http://bermuda.election.bm

Youth & Sports www.youthandsport.com