My host moved the mysql server a week or so ago so I expected to have some downtime. I feel stupid that it took me so long to realise that they had finished the move due to what I believe is a cpanel bug. They finished the move a long time ago but I couldn’t log in because of this bug (and intermittent ddos didn’t help either). Even though my login credentials hadn’t changed, I still kept getting an error message at the phpmyadmin login screen as well as this error from WordPress, which I had never seen before:

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the “databasename” database

It turns out that all I had to do was change my password by clicking “Change Password” in cpanel and then everything worked. It also still worked when I tried changing it to something else and then changing it back immediately. But if I hadn’t read about this bug on a forum somewhere I never would have known. I would have just sat here twiddling my thumbs assuming that the problem was due to residual issues from the move. I’m very happy now though, in any case.

Before realizing that this was such a trivial thing to fix, I tried visiting some of the other sites hosted on this server (in a virtual machine, of course) to see if they were having problems too and, sure enough, most of them just throw out “Error establishing a database connection”.