Guys, remember that this is a free site, the admins pay for everything to keep this up and running.
As per previous comments, what happens is in times the site is popular, the access log (which records every person that visits the site (guest or not)) fills up, and the server runs out of hard drive space, and then goes offline (database error), or the web server crashes. At least that's my understanding.
I believe we have / a new server is on the way, but until such time Nash or habs have a spare moment to do the swapover, we all just need to be patient.
In times around when the database goes down, there can sometimes be corruption to the database, which requires a complete restore of it.