Posted by Neil Wyatt on 08/02/2017 19:49:44:
It probably though the sudden increase in attention was a DOS attack!
Earlier it was down completely, I cleared my cache and it loads in about 5 seconds on my humble 2.8 meg connection.
Just a thought, one ISP had a major failure at a data centre today which has caused intermittent problems for me today, so if they use the same one…
Neil
Unlikely to have been mistaken for a DOS attack. I used to work for the company that hosts the SMEE website and their firewalls and monitoring systems are more than capable of discerning between a DOS attack and a sudden increase in 'credible' traffic, it would take a lot more attention than would be given by the entire membership of this forum to trigger an alert. A DOS attack signature is indicated by many hundreds if not thousands of access requests in rapid succession and often from a specific IP address range.
There's no indication of issues with any of their DC's. There is however, evidence to indicate that there was either an issue with the database hosting platform or with the interface between it and the web platform. The response times from the web platform were varying wildly during the outage.