My apologies. As of late, there have been several service disruptions on this site. In speaking with my web host, they have identified the following issues:
- On Thursday 4/11 and 4/18 between 6-10 am local time (1000-1400 UTC) the server that hosts engineeringradio.us was subjected to a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, where approximately 200,000 login attempts were made per hour from 90,000 different IP addresses. This was part of a greater attack on WordPress websites.
- On Wednesday 4/24 there was another DoS attack of a more limited and focused scale around 3-4 pm time frame
- On Tuesday 4/30 beginning at 5 am, (0900 UTC) there was a server issue which returned an error 404 message to anyone trying access the web site. The .htaccess file was somehow corrupted, which later caused a error 500 message. This outage lasted until approximately 2 pm (1800 UTC) when the .htaccess file was reloaded.
I have taken several steps to secure the web server and web site against intrusions and other attacks. A distributed DoS attack is very hard to track and combat, the best course is to beef up security policies and weather the attacks when they come. I have contemplated moving this website to my own server, but that is more work than I have time for right now. Perhaps at some future point, if reliability continues to be an issue, I will do that.
For now, your patience is appreciated.
