Don't take it personally Dave, no one's having a go at you or your site, mate.
I know. I just think that people remember the outages and attribute more worth to it that actually happens. So I'm trying to explain what's causing these things.
For example, a lot (majority?) of the outages had to do with various issues related to the technical setup of the server, software-side that is. Trying to tweak it for best performance etc over a year or two as random or rare issues crop up. This would have happened with any host.
But now if I switched hosts now, either
a) those issues could start all over again
or
b) not happen again because they have been sorted out already.
if it's b) then bingo, people will think it was my host (HostGator) when in fact it wasn't.
The forum isn't down that often or for that long, but I too have noticed that it does indeed seem to be more frequent than other sites.
Perhaps, but it's not a big deal. If you actually looked at the uptime I'm sure it's in the 99.9x% category. And it's
always fast and reliable when it is up.