Shot/Seen

The reason Notes from a Teacher is down is that it has been taken offline by my host because of it was generating so many requests for pages that they shut down their server.

So far, the tech folk at my host haven’t been that helpful. Making it worse: it’s a long weekend here in Canada and it doesn’t look like I’ll even get any answers until Tuesday. But, poking around in the various log files for my site, it seems that Notes is under some sort of attack.

Even with the site offline (it’s in a separate directory at the site), I’m still getting more than 1,000 requests for pages from Notes from a Teacher every hour. Some are legitimate —Google bots and the such. Others are coming from servers in the U.S., Venezeula, Japan, Russia and other countries. Each one hits the site and generates requests for dozens of pages from the blog in the space of a few minutes. This has been going on constantly since I started checking the “error” and “latest visitor” logs yesterday afternoon.

I haven’t been able to confirm with my host that this is a denial-of-service type of attack but, from everything I’ve read and seen, it sure looks like one. I don’t know if I’ve been randomly targeted or caught up in an attack against others being hosted at the site. (The thought that I might have been deliberately targeted is a chilling one.)

I don’t know what the long-term implications are. I’ve read a couple of pieces that I suggest I may have to change domain names, and possibly even hosts, to get out from underneath this.

So, the blog is down and I have no idea when it will be coming back, or where it will be coming back.