Let me assure you that there is NEVER any shortage of free-speech material to write about! Our team can’t even begin to keep up with it all.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the situation, in a way.

On the one hand, I don’t like to see anyone go through what you’ve been experiencing.

On the other hand, tales like yours give me material for free-speech posts. (Like the one I finished a few minutes ago.)

Finally, I suggest you seriously consider working with another hosting service. I’m using GoDaddy.com for website hosting for roughly a year now, and have had no serious issues. (GoDaddy provided the best benefit/cost ratio for my needs – you’d want to do your own research.)

Visitor numbers and bandwidth usage shouldn’t be excessive for this kind of political blog. If they are, we should look for a different kind of Denial of Service attack:

That our opponents simply may be spidering the site repeatedly in order to drain the ISP’s resources. Getting all evidence on the table should help identify the problem – meaning getting a detailed traffic analysis showing the IP addresses of everyone reading the site.

If it turns out that certain IP addresses suck up loads of data, those can be banned from accessing the server. They’ll see that the site is unavailable and rejoice. The rest of us will see that the site *is* available, and rejoice as well. Best of both worlds

If the traffic analysis shows no particular traffic, LunarPages are are bunch of bloody liars…

We are aware that this is an ongoing issue and we intend to keep an eye on it.

Please contact the Baron at GOV. He wants to help and would like a brief synopsis from you about what happened.

Sounds as though the people are Lunarpages are lying to you. Maybe there’s an insider sabotaging you. But it’s at least as likely that there’s someone on the outside trying some shenanigans, which may or may not have anything to do with the Anvil, and Lunarpages tech support is incompetent even to begin to investigate the problem. Or maybe someone changed something on their end that suddenly caused some widget on your page to malfunction.

Be that as it may, if they are unable or unwilling to help you solve the problem in a timely manner and keep your site up and running, then they are neither honest nor competent enough to deserve your continued business.

1389

I wish I had a better technical understanding of what might be causing the “problems” that LunarPages is accusing the Anvil of causing in its shared environment, but in all honestly, viewing the traffic levels that I am monitoring, even if there is an exploitable script hidden somewhere within my WordPress, I cannot for the life of me understand how that is going to do much to a server of any professional mettle. What exactly DO they pay the server admins for at these hosting companies anyway? I suggested that they furnish me with traffic information, IP info of possible attackers, etc. and nothing was forthcoming.

I will admit openly that I blew my stack on the phone in technicolor yesterday. I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m separated from my host by a few hundred miles and in the case of their outsourced help staff, probably thousands.

Thanks again for the outpouring of support and concern. It all helps.

Should the Anvil go offline again due to my host, rest assured that I will take steps to place it back online, even if this means that I will one day have to run a server myself.

FH