hosting

Just wow. Soapblox a proprietary/closed blogging CMS architecture and hosting combination, which has been widely used for left-leaning political blogs has been hacked and Soapblox is apparently throwing in the towel. What a mess:

It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

I imagine the soapblox site owner whom I talked to about migrating to Drupal (for nearly free, as I was supportive of what they do) a year ago or so, but never took me up on it, is probably wishing they had this morning. :-)

During the course of administering a server full of various sites which have been Farked, Dugg, and StumbledUpon'd, I've learned first hand the value of optimizing a Drupal site/server to handle large amounts of traffic. I've also learned that eventually it's likely that the level of optimization for one's Drupal site/server will be rendered mostly irrelevant by frequent, and (mostly) malicious, circumstances.

Malicious and/or misdirected requests
Compared to more popular subjects such as Drupal optimization, Apache, MySQL, and/or PHP optimization - the subject of malicious requests gets a rare mention. Despite losing the popularity contest to those sexier subjects, rest assured, there is a lot more to running a site than just tuning the former items. All of those things can be working really, really well and your site/server can still be hammered to a state of dysfunction - even with very few users coming through the site.

Welcome to the wonderful world of denial of service attacks and/or server spam. Broadly defined this includes anything that is requesting something from your server that is of a malicious (usually the case) and/or misguided origin. Make no mistake it's a problem which anyone who is running a medium to large size web site will contend with, whether they know it or not.