I doubt it is a HN-Focused tool, as this affected the static content from www.ycombinator.com, and images and CSS are not the focus of bots usually.
Assuming it was not a DoS attack, a smart host should have noticed the traffic load increasing over time, and offered to upgrade to a less-loaded server and recommend a dedicated server.
By disabling the site, they have lost a customer, and lost on a up-sell to a dedicated server.
You're assuming the load today wasn't extraordinary. That's not yet clear. PG doesn't know of any surge, probably based on figures he has access to on other hosts and analytics tools. But what if HN/YC static resources at Pair were newly being deep-linked, by a much more popular site? Only seeing the end-of-day logs from Pair, compared to previous days, can definitively answer this question.
I'm sure that's what the general News.YC/YC stats show. But as the Pair.com tech mentioned, today's logs only become available at midnight ET. If there was a surge this morning -- to the static resources only, as if by offsite deep-linking -- Pair's logs are the only place it would be evident.
Comments
Yes and no.
I doubt it is a HN-Focused tool, as this affected the static content from www.ycombinator.com, and images and CSS are not the focus of bots usually.
Assuming it was not a DoS attack, a smart host should have noticed the traffic load increasing over time, and offered to upgrade to a less-loaded server and recommend a dedicated server.
By disabling the site, they have lost a customer, and lost on a up-sell to a dedicated server.
You're assuming the load today wasn't extraordinary. That's not yet clear. PG doesn't know of any surge, probably based on figures he has access to on other hosts and analytics tools. But what if HN/YC static resources at Pair were newly being deep-linked, by a much more popular site? Only seeing the end-of-day logs from Pair, compared to previous days, can definitively answer this question.
tlb says it was "gradual": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283439 .
I'm sure that's what the general News.YC/YC stats show. But as the Pair.com tech mentioned, today's logs only become available at midnight ET. If there was a surge this morning -- to the static resources only, as if by offsite deep-linking -- Pair's logs are the only place it would be evident.