Blog Downtime: "Error Establishing database connection"

My blog's been down since the 18th, so I'm really glad to have it up again. At first I thought it was a temporary hiccup by x10hosting (which does the hosting for this blog), but it's turned out to be something bigger.

Last Monday x10 decided to upgrade something, and I realized it broke Wordpress only later, because the main site was still working. I received a page which said only, "Error Establishing database connection". Nothing else. A bit of Google-fu found me the likely cause of the problem: the MySQL database.

I wasn't able to actually fix it until I found two videos by educhalk.org. There are five likely causes to the "Error Establishing database connection" error: incorrect MySQL database name, incorrect MySQL database username, incorrect MySQL database password, or incorrect MySQL host in your wp-config.php file. In my case, my database name and username was still correct. I had no way of checking whether the database password was off. Lastly, in previous editions of the x10 code, my MySQL host (which directed me to my cpanel server rather the default "localhost") had worked just fine.

With nothing else to check by, I changed my MySQL host to "localhost". It worked. Ta-da, back to blog activity.

All in all, I'm glad to see this up again. The downtime, thanks to x10hosting, sort of led me to contemplate on whether I should seek out paid hosting sometime soon for a more reliable connection.