As you might have noticed, my blog was unavailable on and off for about 36 hours a few days ago. Obviously, this is not something I'm happy about.

The reason for the down-time seemed to be some trouble with the mySQL server. It just didn't want to start. I tried everything I knew, then contacted my hosting company. They told me to restart the mysqld service (done). They then told me to reboot the server (done). After several more emails from me, describing the problem, I didn't hear anything.

Come the next day, I sent some more emails to the hosting company. Still no response. Around 1 pm, I called them. As it turns out, some other server in their hosting environment had been hacked and they'd been working on that one first... Doh! It took the support tech 2 mins to determine my disk was full!

I have written a post earlier about why you should keep your Joomla sites updated for safety reasons.

Phil Taylor published this Tweet today:

A lot of people getting old versions of #joomla 1.5 hacked today - been fixing sites all day for customers...
UPGRADE NOW to #Joomla (latest version)

I couldn't say it better myself. It's crucial that you upgrade to the latest version of Joomla.