Admin & Website Suddenly Slow

I have been running my website http://www.cinefantasitqueonline.com with WordPress for two years without problems. Last night, the website and the administrative section suddenly slowed down to the point where pages time out before loading. Stats have recorded 5 page views so far today, whereas usually the number is over 2,000.

I had not made any major changes to the site. Since noting the problem I have deactivated some plug-ins. The only one that seemed to make a (slight) difference was automatic wordpress backup, but the admin section still tends to time out, and the website does not fully load: the footer is missing.

You probably have questions about my service provider, javascript,etc, but here’s the thing: I have another, almost identical wordpress website running off the same provider, and it is working perfectly.

Both cinefantasituqeonline.com and hollywoodgothique.com are hosted on Bravenet, using Justin Tadlock’s Options Theme. Cinefantastique uses the Blue Danue child theme and wordpress 2.7.1.; Hollywood Gothique uses the Shaodows child theme and wordpres 2.7. They have almost the same plugins (except Cinefantastique’s are now deactivated).

Don’t know whether this is relevant, but on July 12 I set the WordPress Database backup plugin to email weekly backups for both websites. The one for Hollywood Gothique arrived a week later; never received one for Cinefantastique.

When I noticed the problem with Cinefantastique, I tried to do a backup with the WordPress Database backup plugin, but it wouldn’t work – got to 12% and stopped dead.

Does this mean the problem is with the database?