The Login Server issues lately have really been getting out of hand. It was one thing 6 months ago when it would only happen for a few days a month, but now it is a regular occurrence that is happening weekly or even multiple times per week.
I think the problems are probably related to what I think is an increase in popularity and population on the emulator. It has increased the number of MySQL connections and I assume that is the cause of the failures. It is good that the project may be growing in popularity, but I am sure it would be much more popular if it wasn't for these Login Server issues. It is to a point where the Login Server issues aren't just an annoyance anymore, they are taking a toll on the entire project.
Just to guess as to the cause of the problem, I think that either the max connection setting or the idle connection timeout setting for MySQL are probably set wrong for the population that the emulator has now. Here is a post that describes a problem that appears to be the same thing that eqemulator.net is experiencing:
http://forum.siteground.com/showthread.php?t=2096
I am not saying that the settings listed in that post are the solution to the LS issues, but at least that is an idea of what might need to be looked into or adjusted to see if it makes improvements.
We need to see if we can get more support from Rogean or doodman to see if we can get this problem resolved. If they can't/won't do it themselves, maybe they could finally allow someone else access (KLS or Cavedude maybe) to the server host so they can play around with it. At least having access to someone that will be able to actively work on this, I am confident that the problem could be resolved for good or at least, improved greatly. Really, I don't see why they wouldn't want to spend the few hours it would take to work on this issue in trade for not having to deal with restarting MySQL multiple times per week.
The thing is that I don't remember Login Server issues like this ever happening on the old hosting. Even if they did, it wasn't nearly as often as they do since the hosting changed. So, the old host must have had better settings to handle the number of connections that it needs to. That being the case should mean that this should definitely be a resolvable issue and I don't see why a little time can't be spent on it. This is affecting thousands of members and the entire project as a whole. It is definitely one of the biggest factors holding back the emulator for a long time now.