All good guesses...but unfortunately, it's a bit more serious than that.
Each time a member here calls up a forum page, it requires 10-12 databases inquiries to get and display information. Our new hosts have a 50,000 inquires/hour limit, and once that limit is reached, the database shuts down for the remainder of that hour, during which time the error message above will be displayed. After the hour has passed, the database is reset, and it's fully functional again. Now, I can manually reset it myself, and it's something I've found myself doing pretty frequently to get the forums back online. Needless to say, it's still a major PIA.
All this is simply caused by the fairly rapid increase of memberships and site/forum usage, as the site becomes more and more popular and more folks are visiting. Here's the scoop:
When I recently transferred the site to the new hosts, I actually bought two accounts with them. One of them is a shared-hosting package, and is basically an identical setup we had with our old hosts, so it wasn't an upgrade but more of a lateral transfer. Why? Well, it was mainly just to have some place to host the site temporarily, to buy me some time until I could get the second account set up properly to take over.
The second account is a VPS (virtual private server). It's just one step below a true dedicated server, and will be a major improvement over what we've got now,. However, it means I have to not only handle all the site/forum stuff, but I've also got to handle all the server settings as well. Since I've never managed a server before, there's a learning curve involved with trying to get things properly set up. What makes this more difficult is the fact that with a VPS, there's virtually no tech support. Any web host figures that if you're buying a VPS account, you're already versed in server maintenance and don't need the help....they won't hold your hand like they do with shared host accounts.
Anyway, I've been spending a lot of time reading, trying things out, etc, and I'm almost got things to the point where I'll feel comfortable getting the site moved over one more time to the VPS, so that will be happening in the very near future. Yes, that's right....another move is coming up. But this time instead of moving from one crappy apartment to another, we're upgrading to a condo.
In the meantime, all I can say is 'hang in there, folks'. I'm doing the best I can, and have been spending a majority of what little spare time I have these days getting things set up. (Heck, I haven't had a shop day to spend with my truck in months!)
Right now I've got a fully functional site and forums set up on the VPS, and I'm just fine-tuning a few things before flicking the big switch.
It has happened before also...
