We're back (after a really long downtime)
Sorry I don't have time, right now, to explain everything that happened over the last ten days or so, but our host ran into some trouble with their SAN, the file system on our nginx/PHP VPS was permanently hosed and I had to rebuild it from scratch.
To compound the problem, I couldn't start rebuilding the VPS for around 4 days because: we were away (why do these things always happen on the day you're leaving to go somewhere?); I couldn't even delete the VPS with the corrupted file system because the host had disabled all those options while they fixed their problems.
I've asked them for some kind of compensation, since forcing your client's VPS to be offline for four days is daft (though I get the impression we were the only ones to have all our data corrupted, most people just had a couple of hours downtime here-and-there).
a Padded Cell our articles site!