This afternoon I noticed that my web server was under attack from numerous individual IP addresses (I think it was botnet of some sort). I was taking my httpd server offline throughout the day to try to deal with it. When so many different Ip addresses connect to your web server at the same time it can overload your web server. Turning off the http server reduced the load back to normal and allowed me to work on the problem. That is why you couldn't access the websites for most of the afternoon and evening. We are still monitoring the situation and can't say it is resolved but at the moment we are back to normal. A ddos attack is short for "distributed denial of service attack" in case you want to google the issue.