Well, everything sure went tits up tonight!
Dunno what happened there but everything ground to a complete halt.
My hosts said "this was a memory issue and we will be making certain server configuration changes as well as a kernel upgrade later tonight"
That means another reboot at 12am Eastern Time which means the database servers will go down again.
I've just got a load of emails through from about four days ago so hopefully this will have sorted the very poor performance of the site of late.