So there’s a pretty good chance the site may go down at some point during the week. I am dangerously close to exceeding my monthly bandwith limit and if that happens, the site will be down until April’s billing cycle starts. I am not going to pay the overages and I will decline any offers to do so, for reasons that I am about to explain…
In most cases, exceeding my monthly bandwith could be considered a good thing. It would mean that my site recieves great traffic and is adored by several thousand regular visitors. And while I certainly do OK in terms of traffic, that is not the reason that my bandwith is almost gone. In recent weeks, I have been threatened by several people (or perhaps one person with multiple e-mails and way too much free time) who are angry with me over a Maddox parody hosted on my site. The page was supposed to be a private joke, but somehow it was leaked. Quite a few people have seen it now, including some of Maddox’s more rabid fans. These people can’t take a fucking joke (or spell… or put together a coherent thought) and they’re pissed at me for hosting the page. Their hostility has mostly taken the form of vulgar e-mails, but there have been a few unpleasant incidents on the forums too. If that were the full extent of the problems, I would just ignore these pricks and get on with my life. But lately, things have gotten worse.
Over the last few days, I have noticed that my site has been using an unusually high amount of bandwith and that most of this added usage is coming from a handful of IPs. While the e-mails that I’ve received only make vague unintelligible threats, I am fairly positive that this an orchestrated attempt to crash my site. I have tried to use IP blocking to protect my bandwith but when I block one IP, a new one takes its place. Not only does this confirm my suspicions that someone is fucking with me, it also means there’s not much I can do to stop them right now. I am current working with my webhost, Dreamhost, to find a solution to this problem. I am also in contact with a lawyer about this matter. If there is any legal ground for me to sue these bastards, I’m gonna fucking rape their wallets. I think I may have a case. I am not sure if I can press charges over the bandwith attack, but there were 113 failed attempts to access the site’s FTP on March 25th. If that doesn’t constitute a hacking attempt, I don’t know what does.
So please bear with me over the course of the next week. If the site goes down, don’t panic; I am not quitting and it will be back up at 10 AM EST on Saturday when the new billing cycle starts. Thank you.