I‘m popping back in here to say that I think the blog and site is functioning normally once again. When I first contacted the host yesterday, I was told it was a widespread problem. When the problem didn’t get any better, they called me back and said that the problem was specifically with a high volume of database activity on this site. Since I hadn’t changed anything I wasn’t certain what would cause that problem (other than a possible DDOS attack). In any case, I futzed around with disabling various plug-ins. Nothing seemed to work and I grew pretty frustrated (ready to give up entirely).

This morning, with a somewhat cooler head, I enabled some caching of the site and for now, at least, that seems to have made it more responsive. I’ll continue to monitor it and make improvements where I can. I’m still curious as to what would have caused the high activity in the first place–or if that was really out of the ordinary. When I look at the processes on the server now I see far, far fewer, so something has improved.

I’m not sure what, if any, side-effects the caching might have, so if you see something weird, it could be related to that.

I want to apologize to everyone for this outage. I know it can be frustrating, and for it to happen when I am supposed to be away from the Internet made the response to get it fixed a little longer than I would have liked.  I’ll try to do better in the future.