About the recent shut down of the site.

[jeriddian]

This is to explain why the site had been suspended by our web hosting service for the last 15 hours.

Here's the problem. We are on this new server system and hosting service run by Fat Cow. The reason we made this move was because we expanded our storage capacity from about 25 Gb to more than 100Gb, which would allow me to put up to KPFW screencaps and web site. It was also cheaper. Part of the deal was that we were also to be allowed pretty much unlimited bandwidth for people accessing the site.

However, Fat Cow came back at us and said that the site was using far too much bandwidth. It was almost like a DOS attack. My web engineer/coder looked into this and found out that the same thing was true with our old hosting service. We always had a lot of bots which were always trying to access the GJA. Now we know why. Most, if not all, of these bots were set up for massive downloads of the screencaps. We found out that in just the first three months of this year, literally terabytes of data were downloaded from the GJA in the form of multiple downloads of the images. It accounted for 96% of the activity on our old server for ALL of the webs sites that were there besides GJA. Why it wasn't a problem for that hosting service, I don't know. But it was a problem for Fat Cow, so to interrupt this massive usurpation of the bandwidth, they suspended access to the site.

We've worked with Fat Cow since 10PM last night on the problem, and now have the site back up and running. But we now have to modify the site to prevent this type of activity from happening again. We are in the process of doing this and should have the new protection in place within a day or so.

We aren't too pleased with Fat Cow about this, and my engineer/coder will look the situation over. We were supposed to get unlimited bandwidth anyway, on which they reneged. We may have to move to another hosting service, which fortunately won't be near the problem it was before, now that we know what we need to do, and can avoid the previous missteps. I will keep you posted.

Thanks for your patience.

EDIT: At the present time, the index to the screencaps is disabled to prevent the bots from trying to download anything. My engineer/coder is working on a solution which we hope to have in place in the next couple of days or so.

[lunchmeat]

I was afraid cybersquatters had somehow gotten the domain.

[TransWarpDrive]

I was afraid cybersquatters had somehow gotten the domain.

That was my first thought, too - that somehow our site had been hacked, and the server shut it down for that reason.
I'm glad we've got the problem resolved now - at least so we can access the forum again. I'm in no hurry to download any screencaps; I've got enough of my own on file at home to use for any caption posts. So I can wait until jeriddian's friend writes the code to block the bots.

[AmericanGecko]

Ah, okay. That makes more sense. To be honest, I actually worried this site was having the same problems as KPFW. Glad to see/hear that's not the case.

[Manofevil]

So, any idea when the screencaps will be back up? This week? Next week? Next month?