How long does it take on average to fix server config files? I'm not familiar with server administration so I dont know exactly what the problem is.

My sites have been down since 7pm last night. I contacted my provider at 9pm and told them my sites have beend down for 2 hours. I was told they had to rebuild server config files and had been working on it and would continue working on it but it would be a while longer.

It's now 1pm the next day and I just spoke with them again and was told about 3 hours more or so.

Does this sound reasonable?

Wow, sounds like a meltdown of a Hard drive and everything has to be reinstalled from scratch and all sites restored from backup.
Maybe the backup process had to be done manually, therefore making it take longer.
However the time-frame you mention, if this is the problem, that is avg. to below avg (depending on exactly when it came back).

I assume that since it's been a few days, the service has indeed been restored, I just wanted to help and at least get ya an answer to question

THanks EsrTek, yes the problem has been corrected. My sites came back up but I lost my db's. Fortunatelyon the most important site I did have a db backup so I was able to restore it. On another site, a forum I was starting up, I had about 100 posts or so and no db backup. Oh well.

If you have cron job access I'd highly suggest having MySQL dumps in the cron area nightly. This way you have DB backups in your normal home directory backups. So when you have to restore, as yours did, you have the DB's there to restore too

mysqldump -uuser_name -ppassword db_namehere | gzip > /home/user/dbname.gz

Just change the areas in bold to reflect your info (do not add any spaces)

HTH

Hey thanks, that's a really good idea. I'll see if I can do that!