Lost everything and starting new

Roguehorse.com

Using Dreamhost as my webhost I had a successful website www.roguehorse.net since '06. Google searches on roguehorse brought up images from my website and I gained popularity and activity to my site. All was good and life was grand. Being ever ambitious, I started a new site roguehorse.com through my same host with the intent of expanding the capabilities of my hosting to include tags that users could cut and paste into their favorite panel such as Myspace or Facebook more than just the display of their images but usefulness as well. Gallery is the ultimate open source ware to perform this task. After reading the forums of other gallery users there was no doubt, all my ideas could be obtained using gallery.
Shortly after the birth of roguehorse.com, the strangest of things happened. I came home from work and both websites had gone down simultaneously. Roguehorse.net front page led directly to Comcast home page and roguehorse.com went to a white page that gave a 404 error. I tried multiple computers and all the results were the same! 20min later both sites were up and running again without any noticeable problems. I contacted the tech support of my host and they had me run a trace route. Everything was fine on their end and my end. In 3 years, never a problem.
2 days later, none of my gallery image files can be found. Following the links through roguehorse.net leads to "install gallery 2.3" which doesn't work. Before, you could go directly from the "selections" page of roguehorse.net directly to the album pages in gallery then there was nothing. No links to my gallery would work at all. Everything got directed to "install gallery 2.3" which I was already running and loving. Tech support at Dreamhost had no explanations for me. The only place I had to turn was my buddy David at sterryit.com the author of TweetScan. We've been friends for 10 years and after a few hours of linking between computers we came to the conclusion that all my pic files were gone. Hundreds, if not into the thousands of pics and graphics just gone. I would have to start fresh again.
Did I screw up trying to copy all info from roguehorse.net to roguehorse.com? Did I mess up some setting at my server end in the settings? Did someone hack into my site and delete all my pic files? I have left everything as it was in my roguehorse.net gallery files and began starting anew in roguehorse.com. I just recently downloaded gallery2.3 to roguehorse.com (fresh) and have yet to do the initial set up. This time around I want to make sure I have all the security in place necessary since reading the development pages. My gut tells me I got hacked. I have faith in my server and their integrity. What in the world could have caused this dilemma? Of course I'm leaning towards the "hacker" part. Some malicious individual that wants to cause me some kind of pain for whatever trivial and superficial reason. How do I protect myself from letting this happen again before I get too far into the next "install"?

Fool me once....fool me twice (I don't think so)!

....and we're off and running.