I have checked the news from our host - Dreamhost - and it turns out they have been having massive network problems for the past week or so. A very bad run of luck.
I'll quote what they had to say:
Right now we’re still down one fileserver and that’s being worked on. There’s also still a lot of websites down and those are being brought up as fast as possible.
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(From their Status feed - this was posted yesterday)
Many of you have been writing in to say that you’re still having problems with your site speed and email connections. We’re still experiencing intermittent difficulties with NFS traffic and high loads on our web and mail servers as a result of the recent filer and power problems that we’ve documented here. Our admin team is continuing to work on these problems and we’re hoping to get everything back to normal soon. We thank you all for your patience during these trying times.
Hopefully, Dreamhost will be able to sort out their problems, and the admins and mods of this board will be keeping an eye on the situation. I'm just posting this so everyone knows what is going on.
Thank you for your patience, and I hope Heaven & Earth will be back to normal soon.