I knew it would be tempting fate to say that the website hadn’t crashed.
No sooner had I written the last blog when … CRASH … down it came.
I tracked it down to an IP address in Italy and I’m pretty sure it was a website crawler (or copier) rather than a malicious attack. Nonetheless, it was requesting several pages a second (by contrast the googlebot requests one page every 30-40 seconds) and although the server stayed up for two hours serving pages at a furious rate, eventually it was overloaded.
Anyway, I think I’ve fixed it now. (And if you are a user whose ISP is Telecom Italia Net and you’d like to get access again – please fix your crawler to be a little more polite and then get in touch. I don’t want to exclude anyone who’s genuinely interested in visiting the site.)
Chris