Complete shop failure

I was deleting some test orders from Admin in s l o p e s t a r s.co.uk when the system fell over. The hosting company Fasthosts is unhelpful and pointed me to the logfiles which say:

[Thu Jan 22 16:02:08 2009] [alert] [client 86.4.142.20] (2)No such file or directory: FastCGI: failed to connect to (dynamic) server "/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi": something is seriously wrong, any chance the socket/named_pipe directory was removed?, see the FastCgiIpcDir directive - - - - - - - - -

This indicates that the server has failed but I suppose it could also be that a Zen file has been somehow deleted or corrupted - - or there is a database corruption - - possibly caused by an intermittent connection with the server - Fasthosts does seem to come and go when working on Zen shops.

Has anyone else experienced this? If one tries to access the shop now through links on the index.htm page of the site INTERNAL SERVER ERROR appears. I am prepared to accept that I might have corrupted something from within the ADMIN page but it was entirely unexpected and very very worrying.

If anyone has experienced this I would be very grateful to hear from them.

OK - an update for the records in case anyone else has this problem: Fasthosts provide a file called test.php in their support section which consists of a simple form. I FTP'd this into my slopestars root directory and also into my shop folder then tried to run it from my browser. It didn't work!

I also FTP'd it into a working site and it ran fine.

Conclusion: someone had modified my server space not to run php scripts - or moved my files to another server - or been messing about with a php upgrade without ascertaining the consequences before they screwed up a real customer. At 8 p.m. they admitted it was a server problem. 16 hours later the shop sprung miraculously back into life.

Recommendation: If this happens to you and you don't know whether it is a corrupted database or a corrupted php file, try running a simple test.php file. It could save you hours of wasted time.