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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
While they are working on the problem, they didn’t pretend all would be well tomorrow. They’ve been investigating and\u00a0sending out cease and desist orders and have been bulking up on their defense mechanisms,\u00a0but obviously this is still going on.<\/p>\n
I figure I’ll give them a\u00a0few days\u00a0to fix the problem, but if this\u00a0persists then in\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"