All right, here's the debrief.

As I mentioned previously, we moved to the Dreamhost PS virtual private server thing. Unfortunately, we were getting clobbered by something somewhere that was keeping us from even getting to the site via the Web. FTP was fine, though.

Now, as to what actually happened, I have no idea. The two theories offered up by Dreamhost technical support were that we were getting hit by some bots that we had previously been shielded from on the shared hosting and/or some bot was creating some sort of endless loop that was making our PHP processes inflate to bursting.

I can't really assess either one of these, frankly. I can say that it was very odd that some bots that were known to misbehave (like Altavista's Scooter 3.3 for instance), which I had gone ahead and banned from the site by IP address in my htaccess file, were now running around on the site. Can it be that the server was so slammed that the .htaccess wasn't being loaded? I dunno. Plausible, I guess. What I will say is that if the first theory is right, then I'm puzzled as to why, if you had known bad things blocked, you wouldn't block them for all customers? Or at least make it optional for those people who…well, I don't know who would want that crap, honestly. But you see what I'm saying. I hope.

As for the second theory–again, no clue. What I find strange is that even when the memory graph was showing I had plenty of memory, I still couldn't get in. The theory was put forward that I was getting hammered so hard that the memory graph couldn't cope and was showing bad data…which if that's the case, that makes it worthless. How can you make decisions based on bad data? If that is the case, it should simply not appear or give an error message. And I was told I could SSH into the server and kill all processes to free things up, but the server was getting hammered so hard I couldn't access it.

So deaf, extremely dumb and blind like I was, there didn't seem to be much of anything to do it–the site was working fine on shared hosting, send me back. So I cancelled Dreamhost PS.

Now, in Dreamhost's defense, they've always been very good and responsive on things. This may not have been the virtual server's setup's fault. However, when you have something running on Situation A and then you move it to Situation B and it bursts into flames but then the flames go away when you go back to Situation A…that would lead one to believe Situation B is at fault. But I couldn't wait any longer to get the site back up, so I bailed. What am I going to do for virtual server hosting now that Dreamhost PS won't work for me? No idea yet, but stay tuned.