OK I now have more information. Pchan the wizard of DL has cast his Identify spell and it has told him we are short of memory on the server. This is RAM memory, not related to the database and our activities.
Now this is a long story and one I feel we need to share with you all. Amazon has been hosting us successfully for some years now but we got a message from them a while back to say they were not going to support the Ubuntu version which is our operating system. There has been a lot of work going on in the background to try to resolve this but it is not an easy fix as we have to change a number of platforms we use on DL before we can move to another operating system. Unfortnately Pchan does not have the luxury of free time any more and so Tusk has been trying to do this gradually on his own but servers and server builds are not his area of expertise. We even roped in Aqua to assist him in somev areas but unfortunately we have to get to a point where he can get access to the test site to do so, and we are not yet at that stage.
The long and short of it is that until we can find a way forward, these memory issues may recur. We hope not but forewarned is forearmed as they say.
In the meantime if anyone has any ideas, suggestions or server expertise, please get in touch.
Still clueless at this end.