Beginning on Tuesday 20th June, 2006, the JR Miller site suffered from a Distributed Denial of Service. A DDoS attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing a denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to legitimate users.
Archive Miller was not the direct target of the attack, but it was some other website sharing the same hosting service. However, this caused our site to become unavailable. The hosting service, U2-Web, was unable to stop the attack and blamed the network center where their severs were located for the outage. U2 eventually moved to another network center which used different software and a different directory layout. U2 tried to move all the sites they were hosting over to the new network center, but many files were moved to the wrong directories and it was, all in all, a right royal mess. I ended up having to delete all of the 6,000 plus files on the Miller site and starting again from scratch. The Miller site was down for several days and I had to spend a couple of days sorting out the mess. I wasn’t happy, but I accepted this as a fact of life on the Internet.
One of the unacceptable side effects of the move was that U2 also messed up their accounting system. My automatic debits were not being credited to my account and U2 was suspending some of my accounts, often without telling me. A few months later I moved all my accounts from U2 to two new hosting companies, PolurNET and ThePrimeHost. The Archive Miler site uses ThePrimeHost as the primary host and there is a complete backup site on PolurNET.
On Friday 26th January, 2007, the Archive Miller site was hacked by The Turkish Hacker. More than a hundred filles that had ‘index’ in their names were replaced by the hacker with another less relevant file. You may view the file here. Within a couple of hours of realizing the problem and trying a few quick fixes, which didn't work, I pointed the Domain Name Server at the backup site and normality restored. However, at the time of writing, access to thePrimeHost is still limited. The saga continues. . . .