Sorry folks for the outage today. It was totally my fault and a result of sloppy work in transferring the forums to a new server. The transfer didn't go especially well which interrupted my normal flow in such matters and after I finally got the website working I left the original backup of the website inside the directory which was to be backed up on a daily basis. Unfortunately the additional 18GB of space occupied by the original server backup caused the new backup to completely fill the allocated storage space.
When a web server such of this fills up completely there is no rooms for log files such as visitor logs and this causes the system to stop responding. It also corrupts database tables which need to undergo repair procedures.
There is a tiny chance that some data has been lost and if significant we can roll back 24 hours to the original server backup but if not we can carry on as we are, a little wiser and a little more careful to allocate enough storage space and clear out unnessacery files when they are no longer needed.
Big apologies to everyone and I'll try not to do it again.
I have also set up some email alerts for available storage space reaching unexpectedly low levels.
Hope this helps everyone to understand what went wrong.
Andy
