Jadie and I (and the whole freeformed crew) got a huge scare today when our site went down last night at 1:45 am. Dreamhost's support team did not contact us back for over twelve hours and we were stuck with very strange internal server errors after making no changes on the site. Finally we were contacted and told that it was runaway processes from a wordpress plugin that were causing the problem. Since we are not using wordpress on the freeformed.net site, we were both angry and mystified as to what to do next. I had a hunch it was a database server error. So jadie and I backed up all of our code and then deleted the entire freeformed site. We initially put up an html script, which was perfectly fine. But the minute we tried a php script with a sql statement, the site hung again and we got the same errors. We contacted dreamhost, telling them we had deleted all of our processes and their was no way it was anything but a database error (which is what I had originally suggested in my first email to them). We were very nervous, as it seemed that the database had some how gotten corrupted. It wasn't reachable from anywhere, not even php myadmin. Thanks to a conscientious dreamhost employee who restarted the database server the site is back up. And so far we haven't noticed any corruption.

Jadie and i were ready to fly to dreamhost headquarters. It is incredibly frustrating to not have control over your server. Especially when receiving support responses that make no sense. So what did we learn....back up your database, take a deep breath, don't panic immediately and figure out the problem yourself (as much as you can) so that your hosting company can't write it off.

It sure was a stressful day.