Reason: The server will be updated from CentOS 4 to CentOS 6 because CentOS 4 has been declared "end of life" now. CPanel is no longer offering updates for this platform either. This may take a while, so don't panic!
There are 4 independent backups, two of them on my own PC, one on an external harddisk, and one at our hosting provider, so hopefully no data will be lost. It's possible that posts written after this one may be lost. I will switch the forum to read only and make a last database backup before the update starts.