Sorry for the outage today. A transformer which supplies power to the data center which houses my server (which is located in Orem, Utah) was hit by lightning this evening and suffered a catastrophic power failure at around 7pm EST. The server was safely shut down under backup power but had to remain off-line while Rocky Mountain Power replaced the damages transformer and other systems.
This site is hosted by Hostmonster.com and they were very good about letting me know about the problem and keeping me up to date on the progress of the repair. When I called them on the phone to speak about it, I actually got a real live person who knew the situation and explained what was going on. Their repair estimate was 9:30pm EST and the site came back online within 30 minutes of that. As far as I can tell, all is now well.
Hopefully this is a "once in a blue moon" situation and won't happen again anytime soon! So far I've been happy with Hostmonster's service. They offer quite a lot for a very reasonable monthly fee.