Personally I can't stand Twitter. :) But I did create http://budgetlightforum.blogspot.com a long time ago. I should probably list this as the official offsite status update location.
Thanks for the reminder!
Sounds kind of fishy for a Host. I imagine they did what most do, oversell the hell out of the resources and then try to blame it on something else. Typical for many hosting services. Of course, money is the name of the game, but shutting sites down without notification is just nasty. I've noticed many "peak times" where I can't get into the site. Hopefully they will add servers to carry the increased traffic, of course they will want more money.
Oh and apology accepted. Even Admins need sleep
I'm more than happy to make a donation to the site to assist with migration to a new host, if that would help....
I believe plenty would do the same.
+1
Can't stand Facebook either. :)
I just added a menu link to http://budgetlightforum.blogspot.com , which we can use for offsite communication in case of another outage.
Thanks to everyone for their patience!
+1
Thanks very much for the offers, I really appreciate the thought. But I don't think it'll be necessary. Let's see if this happens again and how our host handles it. If they drop the ball again, then you can be sure I'll be around here asking for hosting suggestions. :)
I had to talk to my wife last night cause BLF was down.
I just literally laughed out loud reading this....the wifey asked me what was so funny.
Nothing, honey.
Just taken me around 2 hrs to get back in?
been trying for few hours to access the site. Glad its back.
Me too. On one try I get a redirect to a page (drubal or drupal or something) saying BLF had an error with over 300 connections.
Yup, the site was down for me for the last few hours as well. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to ping the site. I guess I'm still a little under the weather...
I did a scan, it seemed to be an error 500 hours ago, glad to see the site back on its feet again!
How many of us thought The Darkside had finally taken over the world? Har Haar Haaar!! Oh. Just me then.. 
Grrrrr, it seems they have established an arbitrary 300 connection threshold. Again without notifying me.
Could somebody please take a screenshot if you get redirected to a page that mentions 300 connections? And please let me know how many users and visitors are online at that time of day? Apparently usage peaks somewhere around 3:00 AM GMT. I'm still not sure if we are actually serving 300 mostly legitimate users at the peak time, or if somebody is trying to DoS the site.
300 sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Do the reports that you are given ever show that many users? I notice that many times registered users and guests are about 50/50.
When I wasn’t able to get on I don’t recall being redirected but maybe I didn’t pay enough attention.
300 connections surely includes non-registered lurkers? I don't find it one bit surprising that 300 people may be viewing at peak.
Yes, including anonymous users. Hmmm, 300 concurrent viewers? Sounds a bit high. I'm trying to get information from our host about how many IP addresses are establishing those 300 connections. Although some browsers establish multiple connections to the same host to speed up the page rendering, so I guess that's not a very accurate metric either.
300 connections? Would that not means more than a 1000 viewers? Maybe even a few 1000?
Or did they say sessions?
I have not seen any "max. 300 connection" page, only timeouts and a single time a page with some sort of configuration error.