The website is back up! No longer will you have to look at old, cached content. Not that much would have changed even if the website had been up. It's the principle of the thing (not to mention poor castofhorrible.com, which did not have the fancy cache that this website has).

Dreamhost somehow misconfigured a perfectly working MySQL server. It only took them over 24 hours to figure out the problem. I then had to manually go in and repair all the tables, crossing my fingers in the hopes that it worked. It did, and nothing seems lost as far as I've been able to tell. Even the old content is still there.

I'm now resolved more than ever to (1) backup my databases more than once a year (igh); and (2) find a different host. While Dreamhost has been relatively good to me, and it's difficult to beat its "promised" bandwidth and particularly storage limits, moving up to the private server plan has increased the costs, putting it within striking distance of a host that includes a SLA (that's a Service Level Agreement). While that doesn't guarantee uptime, it does ensure I don't have to pay for downtime. Think of all those googlers that likely would not have found my website during the last day.