Website Outage

The recent website outage occurred because our webhosting company disconnected our server from the Internet. Their explanation was not supported by any data and I am seeking more information.I apologize for the inconvenience.

Here's the response to my inquiry for more information: A DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) requires network expertise and resources. Whoever did this was not only angry but skilled and well resourced. Maybe some of our members with expertise in this area can comment. Members can't respond to threads in this forum (The Public Record forum), so I'll move this thread over to the Announcements forum.

Thread moved here from the The Public Record forum.

Hi CS,I'm a bit short of time right now, so let me just briefly provide a couple answers.I value the post history as much as anyone. The database is backed up periodically.Posts are stored in the database in HTML format. The current size of the database is about 2 GB, most of it messages. It wouldn't be too difficult to add a feature that throws the HTML for an entire thread into a file instead of a page at a time out to a browser, but I have no plans to do that at this time.The thread index you get when you click on your name will tell you how many threads you've participated in, but it wouldn't give you an estimate of the size. Obviously it wouldn't be too big, since the total of all messages is around 2 GB. If your threads represented 1% of the total then that would be around 20 MB, a very modest size by today's standards.