Last night the Rackspace Cloud experienced power outages that affected our database servers for VanillaForums.com. Due to the unexpected shutdown, our database servers automatically repaired some damaged tables. One of these tables was the mysql.user table, where it removed a corrupted user record, resulting in connections to the database servers from our web servers being denied. This caused the entire system to be inaccessible for approximately 8 hours until we were made aware of the problem.
We have fixed the issue on our main database server, and access has been restored. There are still fixes that need to be implemented, and we are working through all of the forums to ensure the data is intact. If you find that your forum was corrupted in some way by this shutdown, please contact us at support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.
This is the sort of thing that should sway you from handling the hosting, Mark :) Even if via a 3rd party..
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