Right now I don't know if or it not you can see this but there is an issue going on with the site that myself and my hosting is working to solve but, so far, neither myself nor them have found an issue.

So at least so I could access they whitelisted my IP but I don't yet know if that just gives me access or if you can also access.

If you are able to see this post PLEASE reply to help us track down the issue.

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Seems that the issue is probably solved by my hosting. It seems there was an attack from "Alibaba Cloud". To be honest I'm so out of date that I don't even know what that is but it is apparently fixed and blocked from further issues by my hosting support... I hope... Until proven one never knows if a fix actually fixes anything but my hosting support is REALLY good so I will assume all is working.

Again, PLEASE respond to this post so I know all is really good.

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Jay, I can see both of your posts.

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BB

Site working for me.

As you know, I had issue last night, but all appears to be good right now. An attack on the host would explain the max connections error I saw last night, I imagine.

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

I've only just logged into the site and can confirm it's working on this side of the pond, in the UK.

Ya, all seems good now. The attack may have shut down some sites but there was no damage to any sites.

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For the record, Alibaba Cloud is a cloud services company based in China. It would be similar to Amazon's AWS or Mircosoft's Azure platform. It would seem that an attacker was flooding our web host with traffic to either try to break in or a simple Denial of Service attack. It does appear to have been resolved by our Hosting company.

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

I REALLY like Green Geeks as a hosting outfit mainly due to their support system.

Here is their last send as to the ticket on this. Link left intact as I don't see where it matters. If I read right it is just a list of blocked IP addresses. To get an idea as to the support I sent them that all was good and the ticket could be closed but they refused saying, basically, that it would remain open in a 'pending' state so, if any other related came up, I could add to the same ticket and avoid a lot of typing that has already been done. When I chose this hosting something like 15 years ago or longer I did a LOT of research. In my opinion they are the best. They are even green being powered by a windmill farm. Shoot, they normally end up selling to the power grid instead of using the grid. There have even been times where they didn't bother telling me how to resolve something, they just did it for me. One example is several years ago when they changed their default PHP version to one that would not work with either these forums or my photo gallery. While they explained to me how to fix they just went ahead and did it for me so I didn't need to bother. There is a file associated with a site called .htaccess which is sort of a settings thing that tells the servery how to do some things. Due to their diligence as to teaching, not just fixing, I can now use this file on any site I may have to dictate what PHP version to use.

-------------------------------------------- Last from Green Geeks ----------------------------------
Thank you for your patience. According to my investigation the problem was caused by an attack from Alibaba Cloud
Here is the info related to computerhaven.com:

https://paste.websitehostserver.net/2025/03/04/text_5th7nbaArm

In order to solve this issue we have blocked such IP addresses on the server and activated your websites for public.
Please get back to us if you need any further assistance and let us know how else we can help.

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Grouping and blocking IP addresses seems to be a growing issue, it was something i'd never came across before until a few weeks ago when my NNTP provider blocked a range of IP addresses that mine fell into... needless to say i had to jump through hoops to get my IP address removed from their blacklist, it was never explained to me why or how my IP address fell into the range they blocked.

My IP address is dynamic (DHCP) and not Static so i can only presume it changed randomly and fell within one of their blacklists... either that, or companies are now identifying malicious IP address and blocking whole ranges of IP addresses close to the malicious IP address and it's for customers to prove they are not miscreants for them to lift the block?

I kind of understand why businesses might do that given all the cyber warfare flying about online these days but omg it's a pain when it happens, add that it would be nice if they'd told me that was why they'd blocked my access... especially when all i was trying to do was renew my subscription!

A lot of suppositions but it's the only thing that makes sense to me to explain why it took me almost a week of back and forth emails to be whitelisted again.

I am also DHCP but have never had an issue in that regard.

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Actually it was years ago but I DID have an issue with this site having email notifications for new posts being blocked by my ISP. It wasn't a global issue, just me and my ISP. Got it straightened out but was a pain as is most things with Spectrum.

It isn't just Spectrum either. Large ISP outfits seem to think they know what we do and don't want to get and can dictate our content. It is like registrations on forums. Probably more often than not your ISP will flag self registration where you click the link to conform your email, like this site's registration, and channel to your spam folder where many will not even look.

Personally I think that this practice may in fact protect some people but there should be an option to opt out of filters dealing with emails. It would be a win/win approach as those that actually need the filtering would likely not even think to stop it and those with more knowledge could just turn it off.

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I miss the days when ISP's used to host their own email servers instead of piggybacking on the likes of Yahoo and Google etc... not saying they were necessarliy better but at least we had far greater choices.

Usenet (what's left of it), email, FTP etc are now pipe dreams when considering an ISP, it's all about profit these days