Several people have reported receiving an error message when trying to get to this site.
I know what they were referring to. I got the error as well!
All were something like this, perhaps with minor variations.
“Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
It turns out that most shared hosting services put a cap on a number of server resources, CPU use, bandwidth, etc. And once they are exceeded, the limits are automatically imposed that last up to 24 hours and cause the errors.
After a couple of unsatisfactory inquiries, I finally reached a support tech who took a look at my account and reported that “it appears to be a significant amount of bad bot traffic.”
Who knew there were lots of bad bots active out there in the digital ether!
In any case, she then sent me a file to be installed that will shut off access to a bunch of these bad bots that go by names like Anthill, BackdoorBot, Badass, Bandit, CrazyWebCrawler, Devil, Morfeus Fucking Scanner, Ninja, Screaming, and on and on. You get the idea. A lot of bad actors out there!
And, whether invited or not, good or bad, all these bots take up resources and are likely responsible for shooting this site past the limits a couple of times each day.
With any luck, that will take care of the problems, at least for now. We’ll see next week, after the bots all have time get the message.
