Network Status News & Information

Unfortunately Cloudflare is having an outage right now, which is affecting sites that are now behind Cloudflare.

Cloudflare status can be viewed here: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

Update: Cloudflare believes the issue to be resolved and it looks like services are back.

There have lately been periods of unexpected downtime. This is due to a large increase in bots, scrapers, and other spam on the server. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience because of this -- we know it's frustrating! In short: the bots make a massive amount of requests, which overwhelm the server's resources, and lead to downtime until the bad actors are blocked or give up naturally.

We've been doing our best to block bad IPs as they come in and also make our rate limiting across pages more aggressive. It's clear this isn't going to be a suitable long-term solution though, as the IPs just keep changing once they get blocked, so it's only a short term relief.

As a result, we're investigating and planning for better long term solutions. Unfortunately this will take a bit of time to implement, but it is something we're actively working towards in order to provide a better and more reliable solution in the long term.

We apologise again for the inconvenience, and appreciate any patience you can offer as we make progress on our new structure.

25 August 2025:

Last week we made some changes that have had a very positive impact! We're still continuing to work on implementing more solutions in the long-term, but for the short/medium-term this latest change has been very effective! Fingers crossed.

2 November 2025:

We've sadly seen a resurgence of the last week, which has resulted in more downtime. In response to that, we've now put all sites that we manage DNS for behind Cloudflare, which should add extra protection and mitigation moving forward. Anyone who doesn't use our DNS (i.e. has their domain registered elsewhere) will not have this protection and will need to set up Cloudflare separately. If you submit a support ticket then we can assist with this, or even do it for you!

We're hoping to see some improvements with the Cloudflare implementation and will continue to monitor the situation and make further changes if required.

4 November 2025:

It's too soon to say "we're fixed!" but so far we've seen very positive results from Cloudflare. We've implemented a set of rules that will enforce challenges and/or blocks. We're still adjusting the rules as needed. If you find yourself getting challenge prompts when navigating your site then please feel free to get in touch. We can use your feedback to adjust our rules. It's a fine balance between trying to block bots/spammers, while not impacting "real" traffic.

11 November 2025:

We're going to go ahead and close this for now as the issues definitely seem to have resolved or at least significantly calmed down (knock on wood!). We'll re-open if things pick up again. Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding!

We've scheduled a maintenance window on Saturday, October 16th while we perform some system maintenance. We expect there to be a period of downtime, but we do not expect it to last the whole window. We will be doing our best to minimize the downtime as much as possible.

Update: The maintenance is now complete. Please get in touch if you notice any new issues with your site.

The server was hit with a brute force attack starting on November 15th, 18:07 PM GMT. This involved multiple different IP addresses hitting the server with repetitive requests, which brought the server CPU usage to 100%. That resulted in pages timing out or not being able to load, as the server struggled to cope with all the requests. This first incident lasted until approximately 20:27 PM GMT. Then there were additional hits on the 16th at 1:53 AM until 8:20 AM, and 9:56 AM until 13:40 AM.

What does this mean?

Spammers are basically trying to force their way in by guessing passwords over and over again. We're doing our best to thwart them, but the fact that it's multiple IP addresses makes it challenging. (If it were just one, we could ban it.)

Unfortunately this isn't uncommon. It's exactly like getting a ton of annoying spam comments on your blog post, but this with spam log in attempts (and a lot of them). We are doing everything we can to stay on top of it though. If the server gets hit again then we may temporarily take down the pages they are attempting to access, in an effort to both protect your site, but also to help minimize the load on the server and keep as much of your site up as possible.

What should you do?

Our #1 recommendation is that you ensure your password is nice and strong - at least 12+ characters long, including upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. If you have a strong password then you most likely have nothing to worry about. We'll just do our best to keep them out, and then wait until they get bored, which they eventually will.

Other than that, let us take care of it!

We apologize greatly for the inconvenience.

Our service provider will be performing maintenance on our core routing device. This process will take roughly 15-30 minutes to complete. They will be re-routing traffic through redundant devices, which should hopefully avoid any downtime, but there's still a possibility of temporary network unavailability. In short: there may be a small period of downtime.

This maintenance will be taking place:

Start Time: 16:30 October 9, 2019 US Eastern time
End Time: 18:00 October 9, 2019 US Eastern time

Thanks for your patience!

We'll be migrating everyone to a new server. The actual downtime is only expected to be 1-2 hours, but we'll be implementing, planning, and monitoring the migration all weekend.