Site sluggishness issues

Good morning, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. We noticed some odd behavior with the Anger Central web sites over the weekend. (Main site and Blog) It was very spotty and I wasn’t able to pin it down with regards to the applications we run. I contacted our Hosting Service and asked them to look into it.

My first thought was a failing drive on the server we have space on. That, thankfully, wasn’t the problem. According to the hosting service it appears that someone was going after the sites we handle. It wasn’t a Distributed Denial of Service attack, rather it looked like someone was scraping the site. The hosting service finally spotted the IP address the “attack” was coming from and has blocked it. This should put a stop to the problem.

What is concerning everyone here is why would someone be scraping Anger Central? It isn’t like we’re a bank or do any online commerce. (Other then our Amazon links of course) If this were a normal search engine indexing the site, they are a lot less intrusive. The Hosting service said it was difficult to catch this scrapper because it wasn’t a steady connection. It was more like some kid connecting and disconnecting as he went to do other things.

It could also be someone trying out some new software that scraps a site for offline viewing. I recall those apps from the days of Dial up connections. This could be something similar that was misconfigured in some way. In any case, we are continuing to monitor the situation.

Thank you for your patience.

~The Angry Systems Administrator~

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