Thanks A Lot Dreamhost...

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the blog was in the throws of some rather major hosting disasters, partially due to DreamHost's service. Imagine my surprise when these problems continued AFTER the data center was back up, and the Slashdotting was over. So I sent them an email, and here's what I got:

"Sorry for the problems. Your site should be working now. It would appear someone had throttled your website, likely because it was getting so much traffic to kill the server. They should have written you about it though, arg. The load on the server is staying the same after turning the throttle off, so you should be ok. Should you be throttled again, you can ask to be moved to another server which will keep you from getting throttled. Gage is a machine with fewer people on it, but only 2GB of memory. Let me know if you have further problems or questions.

Justin"

So, the reason the blog's been completely patchy for days and days now is because Dreamhost was throttling it's bandwidth, without even, you know, telling the customer. Well, at least it's back up now as I transition into a new dedicated host, and thanks to Justin for a suitably apologetic and courteous email. That was appreciated. (Oh, and PS, thanks to all the readers who suggested hosting solutions in the previous post. That was very helpful for me, and will be helpful to others.)