Unexpected downtime + possibly moving

[Admin]

So, there has been about 2.5 hours of unexpected downtime for the forum (and the website), with no explanation yet as to why, and the page stalls have immediately returned.
It looks like our hosting provider has oversold the current server capacity and consolidated too many servers that were already hosting a multitude of sites into one. There's only so much pooling you can do into one physical machine before it chokes...

We're looking into getting a VPS with dedicated IP/bandwidth to host everything on now, instead. JustHost/BlueHost was good for a while until these recent issues, and the 'hardware upgrade" was in fact a "performance downgrade". A real pity. Up to now I would recommend them as a hosting company but this has just gone down the drain fast.

I'll keep you all informed about planned downtime and relocation as things progress.

[Admin]

Currently, the forum has been moved back to the machine it was initially set up on. This is a temporary solution to keep things workable while a permanent solution is found for the sudden downturn in hosting quality.

[Admin]

UPDATE: The hosting provider has finally answered one of the two tickets, with the following response, partially quoted:

What you were likely experiencing was the heavy load that would have existed on the server as other accounts were being upgraded to the new platform onto this server. This process is quite intensive as you can imagine, as there are several hundred or more accounts on the server. Even after the upgrading has completed, there will still be a residual load on the server for several hours or more until the load levels back off.

Now, a few things about this reply:

1. The stalls appeared the first time indeed as a result of this merging. The 2.5 hours downtime and even worse performance after that is however not accounted for here - if anything it should have improved over time.
2. Running several hundred "or more" accounts on one single server (and notably sharing one single IP, and each possibly having a number of add-on domains, parked domains and subdomains) I think is massively overselling your web hosting space, if not for server software capacity (having a huge list of vhosts slows things down) or server interface capacity, then for routing and falling massively short on due diligence. Single point of failure for thousands of sites = not a good thing.