I believe many of you have noticed that over the past week my site has been hit and miss. I apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate that many of you have contacted me about your problems, expressing encouragement rather than ire. As I’ve suspected all along, the problem is my host and not my site. I’ve spoken to them for the last week as they’ve told me to optimize this, reduce redundancies with that, and it just hasn’t been working. Finally today I spoke with the right person who knew what was going on.
It turns out my host’s servers are being attacked. He explained it this way: imagine I’m the server and I’m talking and listening to you. All of the sudden someone else comes along and starts yelling in my ear so loudly that I can no longer communicate with you. That other person is the malicious attacker. I guess they send so many invalid requests to the server that it often has a hard time hearing and responding to legitimate requests, like the ones for this website — and many others (this has nothing to do with my website individually).
While they are working on the problem, they didn’t pretend all would be well tomorrow. They’ve been investigating and sending out cease and desist orders and have been bulking up on their defense mechanisms, but obviously this is still going on.
I figure I’ll give them a few days to fix the problem, but if this persists then in the near future we’ll be looking for a new host (suggestions welcome). If that happens, nothing here should change, but it could mean some downtime while the switch happens. I’ll let folks know if that’s the plan.
Again, thanks for your patience. Despite this problem, this site has been getting a lot of traffic, suggesting many of you keep trying until you get through. I hope those that are blocked at the gate come back.
My notes show “high traffic” on November 9, meaning I had trouble connecting or staying connected. That was new.
Yes, it’s been going on for a while. I’m not in the mood to switch hosts, but obviously we can’t stay if it keeps causing trouble!
I think the server’s defense mechanisms are partially to blame for the site not loading. If you cant get in, do the following, and it should be easy to get into the site:
1. Delete History
2. Empty Cache, to get rid of any Mookse cookies.
Now try and get in again – you are thought of as a new person trying to see the site for the first time, and so it lets you in. If your cache/history is full and has other Mookse visits, it probably thinks you are trying to attack it and puts you in a redirect loop.
Clearing my cache just now (Tuesday p.m.) helped a lot.
I was able to easily copy and paste a long piece to the 5th page of the Okparanta comments. I also had time to proof and add paragraph spacing. And I had time to add my e-mail and name. The submission occurred first time. This appears to be working far more easily today, although one factor is that I am working from a place that has very fast Wi-Fi.
Thought you might want to know, Trevor, that the site seems to be working way more efficiently. Which is great!
Yes, let’s hope it stays fixed!