I recently received an email inquiry from a regular reader.

You probably know about this, but in case not: twice in the past two days, when I tried to open your site, I received a message: “Sucuri cloud proxy-backend server timeout.” It gives an error code: HTTP 504 and a server ID: cp12015. In all the years I’ve read your site, these are something new to me.

Yup. Here’s what is going on.

After several digital “attacks”, I subscribed to a service provided by Sucuri.net that adds a layer of cyber security by sending requests to view pages at ilind.net through their proxy server first. That creates an additional firewall, and gives them the ability to screen out and reject illegitimate requests from spammers and hackers. It is normally a transparent process that you won’t notice.

But sometimes ilind.net goes “down” due to something going at my regular hosting service, Hostrocket.com. When that happens, instead of the site simply failing to respond and giving you a “server not found” error, you get an obscure message back from the folks at Sucuri.

When you find this site is down, let me know (email ian@ilind.net). Otherwise, I may have no idea there’s any problem.

Thanks!