Our website outage for 20 hours

I came into our website about 3:00PM yesterday (4-25-2015) and did some work. Then I went out for a dinner party at our neighbor. I returned at 8:30PM. As soon as I opened my e-mails, I saw a warning from Sam Kuk, one of my high school classmates.
He said our website is not working at all. (You guys may not know but a lot of other people comes to our website.)
Sam was really worried about my webpage about the campaign against Shinzo Abe's speech at US Congress.
He said US Government might have shut down our website due to our derogatory campaign against Shinzo Abe, a national guest of USA.
But, hell, how about my freedom of speech??
Then, I found e-mails from Kyujeong Hwang, Sung-Chul Kim, Kwanho Chung, all reporting the problem of our website.

I checked the website and I couldn't even get to the index page. It was gone !!
At this point, I suspected the latest update of MySQL program (you were warned about it) that might have caused password problem. I never thought it was because of the anti-Shinzo Abe webpage.

If you remember... I put up Surpass's warning about the website maintenance. In the warning, there was something about MySQL that raised my hairs as we had bad problem from such update before. So I put up a warning to you as below.
http://www.snucmaa.us/snumc1965/bbs/zboard.php?id=freeboard&no=9805

Obviously, one of the worst things happened.
I wrote a long e-mail to the tech. support of Surpass Hosting.
A series of e-mail exchanges criscrossed the American continent between Calfornia and Florida till 1:00AM last night.
As I was dead tired and as there was no immediate answer, I went to bed at 1:00AM.
I woke up at 4:30AM and sat in front of the screen again. One e-mail came from Surpass Tech support during my sleep.
They thought they solved the problem but I could get into the index page but not to the individual webpages.
E-Mail were exchanged in the morning, and finally at about 2:00PM, I was able to get into webpages. It seemed that we got our website back then !!
Really? I don't know until I see the response from our members.

Here are the brief summaries of the communications between me and the Surpass Support team.

1. After the first report:

Thank you for contacting support. After investigating, we were able to fix the error you were receiving by running a permissions fix on account snucmaa. Your site is now resolving.
If you have any further questions or concerns, please let us know.
Regards, Jessica I. Support Technician, SurpassHosting.com, LLC

2. No, still not working properly and I repeated request.

Thank you for your reply. It seems that the database name, database user, and database passwords are incorrect. These settings must be set within [/home/snucmaa/public_html/snumc1965/bbs/geoip.inc.php] according to the database, username, and passwords configured within cPanel > MySQL Databases. Please configure these settings within the above configuration file and make sure that the password of the database user within the file matches the password of the database user in MySQL Databases.
Edgardo J.

3. I couldn't do what they asked me to do because I couldn't get into CPanel.

At this point the Level I support couldn't handle our problem.
They sent my request to Level II technicians.

I wanted to inform you that your issue has now been escalated to our Level 2 Technical Support Department. Our advanced support technicians will be taking a look at your issue as soon as possible. Please ensure to check your email in the case they require further information that may assist us in resolving your issue.
Andrew T.

4. I wrote again. Then came the answer.

We have resolved the timezone errors at this time by adding the following to your local php.ini:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = America/New_York

From what we can tell, the site is now loading without error (we are seeing what appears to be a message with Korean characters ). Please let us know if you are having any further issues with the site that we may assist you with.
Marc P.

5. However, no sir, I still could not get into each webpage.

It appears that the [/home/snucmaa/public_html/snumc1965/bbs/config.php] file was utilizing the incorrect password. I have corrected this at this time and the [http://snucmaa.us/] site is loading properly now.
Robert.Sl

6. But I still could not get into any webpage.

Thank you for your reply. It appears the MySQL information located in /home/snucmaa/public_html/snumc1965/bbs/geoip.inc.php did not have the correct MySQL information in order to connect properly.
I have updated this information and now these pages are loading without any issues.
Please let us know if you need any further assistance.

Regards, Mary Anne G

7. Now, our website seems to be working OK.
I said hearty "thank you" to Mary Anne. I guess Mary Anne was an angel from above.
She finally got the things fixed. Bless her !!

Now, wait and see what happens.