We use the terms Spider, Crawler, and Reaper pretty much interchangeably here.

You see, they ALL cause traffic.

While Robots/Spiders/Crawlers/Reapers are about 1/3 of our traffic on BigCloset, most of that is VALID traffic.

Sites like Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines, LOVE to index our site. Because we have a lot of inbound and outbound links.

While we have had spammers, and nasty bots crawling the site, and poking around (we ban them fast), we have not been the center of a targeted attack in recent months.

The last time, we were taken out by a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS), the DDoS WAS NOT directed at us. Instead it was directed at another customer, at the same data-center, and we were affected because we were on the same network switch.

So while, we have been hit by Targeted DDoS attacks in the past, and more recently, have been affected by someone else getting hit with a DDoS, our recent downtime is NOT related to that traffic.

Currently our primary issue, is that we are trying to cobble together pieces of hardware from a failing infrastructure while we work on purchasing NEW (and I stress the word NEW) hardware to keep us afloat.

So please keep checking this space. In the next few days we hope to post information for everyone to look at, comment on, and hopefully donate towards keeping BigCloset and other community sites alive for much much longer.

-HuGgLeS-
-Piper, Erin, Cat, Sephrena and BigCloset Elves.....