On the joys of administering websites

It’s not that I’m incapable of learning from my mistakes, it’s more that I usually choose not to.

For example, I’ve learnt there are some things you shouldn’t do … like mention your website has been successfully hacked or publish your web site visits statistics, but I still do it anyway because, well, I want to.

Which leads me to this post.  I recently put up a bit of a self-indulgent post about site visit statistics and laid claim to my own brilliance in choosing to increase my sites monthly band-width another 50% to 12GBs to deal with increasing visits and downloads (Please don’t ask me why that is brilliant, as I may not like the answer).

What I hadn’t counted on at that point in time was that some hacker over in Germany might for some reason decide to try a blunt force attack on my site (apologies to anyone who has tried to use it over the past couple of weeks and found it slow).

I only got an inkling about this attack yesterday when I got a message (not even half way through the month) that I have now used 75% of my newly expanded bandwidth …

wtf?!?

So I had a look at my website statistics and sure enough:

I’d suddenly become super popular in November.  So much so that my site hits had jumped from just over 300,000 in all of October to 3.1 million in the first two weeks of November.

Even I’m capable of admitting that there aren’t that many people interested in mountain biking in Tasmania.

So, I did a massive dump of all the site statistics and sure enough after sieving through them in various ways I found a single IP was responsible for 91% of those hits.

Oh the joys.  This meant that rather than being curled up in bed with my Kindle last night, I instead spent another joyful evening buying and installing software upgrades, blocking and reporting Mr evil IP and trying to find out from my web site hosts what would happen when I hit 12GBs this month.

Maybe Kim’s right … maybe every now and then I should actually think about what I’m doing and learn from my mistakes.

Or more likely I won’t.