There were processes running that consumed all the resources of the server host. In the past, when I referred to the hosting support, they would resolve it within 24 hours.

After 3 days, nothing was happening, so I poked at the problem myself. The host provides console access, which I used, found the offending processes and terminated them. All came from this forum.

The way the forum software is written permits access to web crawlers with no login, so there is no configuration option to stop that.

Before going nuclear, and migrating the forum to a new platform, which would probably have the same 'feature', I looked through the forum code, and I believe I found the offending lines that bypassed security for these anonymous resource killers. Said lines are now removed.

At the bottom of the index page, it shows who's online, and you then see what the 'guests' are busy with. All 'guests' are now diverted to the Login page, you can see this by the red circle next to the current activity for each 'guest'.

This should prevent bots and crawlers from kicking off long-running, resource intensive processes to harvest data.