I think the problems with this site temporarily going down have been fixed
For now, anyway.
Let me know if you encounter any problems getting to the blog.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
For now, anyway.
Let me know if you encounter any problems getting to the blog.
Just out of curiosity, what did you do?
site loaded very quickly just now
Niketas:
First thing I did was to ask my host what was going on, and they said most likely brute force bot attacks. But I knew I’d been subject to that (common with blogs and other websites) for a long time. I have a plugin that supposedly blocks those attacks, and every other day or so it sends me a report about how many it’s repelled. So I couldn’t figure out my next step. I did some research and got a host of suggestions, some of them pretty complicated. A couple said plugins are useless for this, or next to useless. A couple of others recommended this plugin or that one, including the one I already had. But a few recommended another plugin and I tried adding that – it’s called Shield Security. It improved things, starting about a minute from when I activated it (which was hard to do, because the blog kept being unavailable because of the attacks). Since I installed it, the blog seems to be up.
Ironically, the first time I had a problem today was when I hit the “Comments” for this particular post. But seems to be working ok now.
Still early – but it does ‘Feel‘ snappier…
Comments feel about the same…maybe a tad faster.
So far, so good, this evening.
All seems OK now. I can not understand why folks do these kinds of things. I guess those 7 million working age folks who are not working need something to amuse themselves.
One assumes WordPress’ firewalls limit traffic from the same IP address over a certain window of time. This can help with denial of service attacks, but the BOT farms know this and typically NAT their IPs so they look like unique visits.
You may be able to ask WordPress to block traffic from certain countries; Russia, Armenia, North Korea, Somalia… This can also be circumvented with VPNs, but it could take care of the lazy, or less sophisticated attackers.