There was an issue this weekend beginning the evening of January 16th through part of the next day.  There was a brute force attempt on the server among other things, and as a result the server had some load issues during the day.  This is resolved now and the SSH port number has been changed to prevent this.  I was on a plane and took care of the issue as soon as I found out about the problem. This is very rare and can normally be fixed immediately if discovered, but due to some confusion as to who to address the situation to, it took longer to fix than it should have.  We have addressed this situation now to prevent this from happening again.  We apologize for any convenience, everything is back to normal now.  The note from an admin:

“Now that the server is stable once again, I’m going to complete the mysql table repairs and optimizations I mentioned. Since time is not of the essence, I’m going to leave nginx up for this.

Secondly, I caught an IP trying to bruteforce ssh on your server. To remedy this, I’ve changed the port for ssh to xxx. This greatly reduces the chance that ssh bruteforce attempts will even occur, let alone succeed. Unfortunately, we are unable to monitor services unless they are on their default ports. For ssh, this isn’t very important, since ssh usually only reports down if there’s a bruteforce attempt going on.

This is reversible, but likely the best solution. Let me know if you’d like me to change it back.”

“Looking at the logs around the time of the e-mail, the IP would appear to be
59.42.48.194. The server has already blocked it for brute force detection.

Sadly, it is pretty common to pick up IP’s trying to brute force SSH, which is
why we have moved it to an alternate port. I can provide a more detailed list
of IP’s which have been blocked for brute force attempts if you wish.”