The email from my host Sitecloud about all the recent problems:
"Dear Valued Customer,
This e-mail is to notify you that we've rolled out the fix for the issue that many of you have been seeing; 503 errors, random outages, performance issues, etc. For those of you who are still experiencing any sort of issues, please e-mail support@sitecloud.com and include as much detail as you can. This would be an odd ball case if you're seeing errors.
Over the course of the last few weeks, service has been seriously deteriorating, mainly due to the network throughput between our instances at Amazon EC2. This causes communication between the instances to be slow which cause performance issues. We then noticed that computing resources from our provisioned instances on Amazon EC2 were being "stolen" by other instances not owned by us, this was causing considerable damage to our front end instances, which then resulted in 503 errors. We had done ample research before selecting Amazon EC2, based on their own sales people, reviews and recommendations. The type of performance/reliability issues that we have been experiencing were not presenting themselves to us during extensive stress testing and beta testing. The condition it is in now, is not suitable for us or our customers. While Amazon EC2 has it's place for number crunching, backup etc, it is evident that it is not ready for mission critical applications, such as ours.
To avoid the worse case scenario, we attempted to work with Amazon EC2 to resolve the issue, however had no success. We made the crucial decision to move on and find alternative infrastructure to host our application on top of.
I'm glad to announce that we've successfully migrated all of our customers from Amazon's EC2 to new infrastructure supplied by Singlehop. We have leveraged their network and hardware to place our application on top of which we are seeing considerable improvement in terms of performance and reliability, reported by both our beta testers, customers moved over from our Amazon EC2 installation and our own administrators/tools. It's important to know that while the back-end infrastructure has changed from Amazon EC2 to Singlehop, the proprietary application that we have built which distributes and manages load is still intact and without problem. Our service remains unchanged except for the problematic underlying infrastructure. The application we have built was developed and tested on infrastructure like Singlehop provides. We are very confident about this decision and we look forward to moving on.
We would like to apologize to all of our customers for the troubles and inconvenience that may have been experienced. We are committed to providing a quality service and will not rest until we are providing it. We look forward to serving you in the future for many years to come.
If you have any questions or concerns, you are more than welcome to e-mail us at support@sitecloud.com.
Thank you for choosing SiteCloud as your cloud hosting provider.
Karl D - Sr. Systems Administrator
SiteCloud LLC"