Plug pulled on extraordinary site activity

I may never know what caused the outage, but much of the activity originated in China.

Checking on the blog late last night, my heart sank when I saw a notice in garish colours (that was bad, but it wasn’t the worst part) saying “This account has been suspended.”

Both my sites were down, along with the email. I imagined people around the world contemplating undeserved doubts about my ability to pay the bill.

Today, after webmail discussions with my hosting provider (they don’t accept telephone calls, but they are wonderfully inexpensive) and puzzling over my email settings, everything was running again.

The server software automatically suspended my sites (wordshine and fastproof) after the activity spiked to over 13 GB in just a few hours. The sites were moved to another server. What were they up to in China?

I’ll probably never find out, but I’m sorry for the disruption and it’s all back to normal. Thanks for your patience.


Well, my additional apologies!

After posting this piece explaining the outage, I went to read it online, as I usually do, just to make sure it worked properly. What further horror to discover that it and all the other posts gave a 404 Not found error!

The gremlin lay in the way WordPress codes its title links and fortunately was the work of moments to rectify, but I apologise to those who might have been frustrated all afternoon.

Well, back to the writing again!

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15 Thoughts on “Plug pulled on extraordinary site activity

  1. Andy on 11/03/2014 at 9:15 am said:

    There seem to be a lot of denial of service attacks on NZ blogs at the moment.
    Whaleoil was the most prominent one recently

  2. Mike Jowsey on 11/03/2014 at 9:18 am said:

    Sounds like Cyber-Weirding to me. Probably due to a build up of stray carbon atoms in cyberspace.

  3. Andy on 11/03/2014 at 9:39 am said:

    Gives me another shameless plug opportunity for the wife and mother in law who are on Campbell Live tonight, talking about the earthquakes and flooding

    • I thought you’d said Monday and spoiled half an hour listening to an emotional roller coaster. I’m not a fan of tabloid in-depth news presentation. But I’ll try again tonight!

    • Andy on 11/03/2014 at 12:19 pm said:

      Yes, sorry it was supposed to be Monday, now today

      We have got the insurance companies by the short and curlies though. SHould be fun.

      Especially with a Mayor of ChCh that believes that 1 metre of sea level rise by 2100 is “likely” and that is what the whole of NZ should adopt as their planning standards

      The inmates are truly running the asylum

    • Well, Campbell had good news at the end that your flood cover was reinstated, but, honestly, I don’t know how you’ve all stayed sane through that. It’s an horrific tale.

    • Andy on 12/03/2014 at 11:23 am said:

      The bit at the end about re-instating flood insurance came about as a phone call from a head at the insurance company after hearing that we were on Campbell Live

      Even so, it doesn’t make the problem go away. The house will still get flooded every time there is heavy rain.

      There is so much wheeling and dealing between government, EQC, CERA, and insurance companies, the punters are getting left out somewhere along the line

      And in the other corner, the usual suspects are wailing about “climate change’ in all this

    • Richard C (NZ) on 12/03/2014 at 1:44 pm said:

      >”And in the other corner, the usual suspects are………..”

      They are idiots. There is no climate-change-driven SLR. And what natural SLR there is is nothing to even bring into this situation because it’s far less over century scale than what the earthquake did in an instant.

      I heard something like – “the locals will tell you the ground fell half a metre”.

      ChCh is the opposite to what happened at Napier. It could happen either way at Whakatane or Papamoa if an earthquake struck there. Not so bad if the land rises but if land plots are no longer habitable where land fell then the EQC should address that pronto. Obviously not after 3 floods in 3 years – 1 was too many. What took so long?

      But at least there’s Ultra-Fast Broadband up the street now – that might speed up the process.

    • Andy on 12/03/2014 at 2:05 pm said:

      There’s another storm tracking down due to hit ChCh this weekend

      Another flood in the offing?

  4. Richard C (NZ) on 11/03/2014 at 11:15 am said:

    >”Both my sites were down [wordshine and fastproof], along with the email. I imagined people around the world contemplating undeserved doubts about my ability to pay the bill.”

    That was my first thought RT – you wouldn’t jeopardise your livelihood, something else was going on and a serious threat to your work.

    Not being alone in your predicament is cold comfort I suppose.

  5. Bob D on 11/03/2014 at 11:28 am said:

    Greetings from San Francisco. I leave the country for a few minutes and everything breaks down. Tsk.

  6. Andy on 11/03/2014 at 8:49 pm said:

    Richard Branson calls for “climate change deniers” to get out of the way
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/10/richard-branson-climate-deniers-get-out-of-the-way

    I wonder if this includes well known sceptic Burt Rutan who designed SpaceshipOne for him?

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