After the outage this past Sunday afternoon, I've decided to move the server to one at a different company.
The IP address of the server suddenly changed, without any announcement (!), and even after
repeatedly asking the provider what the problem was, I still got vague answers that did not make sense.
Getting the site up again on Sunday involved a lot of quick reconfiguring :-(
This morning I transferred the database to a server at new provider ("linode")(which is why the site was out for about 2 hours).
The site will be slower than usual for 1 or 2 days while updated "DNS" info propagates through the internet.
(when you access the site now, the pages are produced on a server in Buffalo (NY), while the database sits on a server in Newark (NJ)...)
In any case, I'll hope the new server will run faster, and be more reliable