egafd.com

To all members of Spuffco.com and casual visitors to our free galleries,

As you may or may not be aware, yesterday afternoon saw the disappearance of www.spuffco.com from the web.

For the last few days we have seen a steady increase in bandwidth usage
for Spuffco.com, but nothing that wasn't manageable.

However, yesterday, usage of both our bandwidth, server resources and
(most importantly) the hosts network itself reached such a level that our
provider was left with no alternative but to suspend the site, as other
servers were becoming affected by the network saturation.

Upon further investigation, we have discovered that a members' username & password have been circulated to various password sites, causing this huge rise in traffic and the resulting site suspension.

We are working with our provider to rsolve the situation, and have
informed them of the membership deletion of the 'culprit', together with
our plans to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Our difficulty lies in us being an adult website (even though adult sites
are allowed by our host) - this makes it harder to be taken seriously.

We will keep you updated, but as a worst case scenario, we may have to
switch to a server on a pure adults-only host, meaning downtime of a
further few days.

Both Andy and I apologise for the inconvenience caused.

Hang in there, as we have some cracking footage to upload over the coming
weeks, including the awesome Harmony Hex and more from Beatrix Bliss.

Kind Regards

Mr Mark / Andy T
Spuffco.com

As an addition to the previous post, we now have software ready to implement that prevents multiple logins from multiple IP's (our payment gateway, we assumed, should have already been doing this!).

This is a lesson, that the circulation of member login details to password sites does nothing but cause harm - both to a small producer like ourselves, and to other members of the website.

We are not Private.com, with unlimited resources, and as such plan our hosting and bandwidth budget and capacity based on projections from previous website activity - this is not a pleasant situiation to be found in.

Rest assured that we know who is responsible and action will be taken.

Keep your eyes on this thread, as this is where updates will be posted.

Downtime will not be for more than a few days.

Keep your wanking arms in shape!

Password protection software is a good idea !wink!

We have suffered this too, not the downtime but password abuse. It's a fucker!

Take a look at this:
http://phantomfrog.com/

or alternatively, this:
http://www.bettercgi.com/strongbox/

Good luck. It's just not the same without a bit of Spuffco !drink!

It's all part of the game.

I've just checked the stats on my password protection system and I notice that my site has been subjected to password hacking attacks every day this week!

I think, Mr Mark, you were lucky to survive this long.

my site seems to to be down too, I dont know what the problem is yet as I have yet to recieve an e-mail from the webhost. However I have a feeling the problem lies at there end as if I go to www.duskfilms.co.uk or pauls-spunksluts.co.uk it comes up with page not displayed.

Even if I try and access my server through ftp when uploading the site or login in to my control panel it all wont load in, so sounds like netcasmedia is having a bit of a problem. Further more the e-mail I have sent, I got a message back saying that the e-mail delievery has been delayed. I hope this is sorted quickly as weekends seem to make the most money over at the spunksluts site lol.

Paul

Fun all round then :/

Thanks for the software suggestions.

Just gonna throw n a suggestion here...

It appears that your all on shared hosting... (Virtual hosting)

What I would do, would be to rally everyone together, spuffco, paul, and some of the other 'smaller' site people, and all go in together on a dedicated box... A dedicated box would probably be overkill for any one of you, both in resources, and in cost...

But if you all chip in together and run say 5 sites off a dedicated box, not only would you eliminated 99% of the problems like you have had, but you can ensure the box is running at full security all the time, and all watch each others backs so to speak...

Split the costs 5 ways if there are five of you and your sorted... Then, If in the future, you hear of anyone else looking for hosting, let them in on it and everyone gets a lower monthly bill...

Sites like dreamhost etc, are great to begin with, but as soon as you start doing any volume... It all goes to shit...

Anyway, just a suggestion... Carry on LOL