So, after a couple days of downtime, the forums are back up. I'm sure the tech support for my hosting probably hated me by day 2, though when I have 30+ people wondering why the site's down, and I have no anwsers, by dang I was going to get some!
The problem was with the MySQL database. For those who don't know, MySQL uses different types for "storage" formats. Two of which are InnoDB and MyISAM. PhpBB used InnoDB by default, and I setup my blog to use MyISAM. Unfortunately with the new upgrade my hosting company just did to my MySQL database, somehow the InnoDB database tables were crashing the entire database server.
So for the past 3 or so weeks the forums had been going down for unexpected, unexplained, reasons. As of right now there is still no fix to that storage type, that I am aware of. Though with constant badgering I finally got the InnoDB tables of the forums converted to the MyISAM format.
I have assurance that the InnoDB type will not be reinstated (so it doesn't crash the server again) until a permanent fix is in place. I hope that holds true.