Hi folks,
Many of you were likely suffering some kind of withdrawal while the forums were unavailable over the last few days. I apologize for putting you through such torment!
Here's what happened: My hosting provider suspended the account. I asked why and was told it was due to the Wiki site. I pushed for more details and they said it was due to massive connections to the Wiki site. Again, I pushed for more details and they said it was a DDOS attack "from thousands of spoofed IPs which keeps on changing". They initially said I need to upgrade to a more expensive VPS hosting account, and then they simply refused to host the account at all. I kept pushing, this time for logs. They sent me about one minute worth of logs and much to my surprise, the only visitor, from about five different IPs, was a clearly identifiable Microsoft Bing search engine spider! This sort of overzealous behaviour from search spiders can easily be controlled via robots.txt files... hardly a problem worth getting upset or cancelling accounts over. Round and round we went a few more times and much to my surprise I managed to convince them of that earlier today. They unsuspended the account and put in some robots.txt files to shoo away the likes of Bing. I've since reallowed Bing, but have throttled them back considerably.
So we're back up and running!
But what a stressful couple of days dealing with those people...
Logged
BWJM, F.O.N.A.
Life Member of CPMS, RCNA, ONA, ANA, IBNS, WCS.
President, IBNS Ontario Chapter.
Treasurer, Waterloo Coin Society.
Show Chair, Cambridge Coin Show.
Fellow of the Ontario Numismatic Association.
