Dogmatic has been documenting Heath Ledger’s forthcoming appearance in the new Batman movie, ‘The Dark Knight’. Overnight the hits went from about 2,000 per day to over 60,000! It renedered the site useless and began to draw the attention of my hosting company ‘Dreamhost’.
This morning, they pulled the plug on me.
In an email to me this morning:
"I’m really sorry about this - and I wish that I didn’t have to do it - but I needed to throw an .htaccess rule in place because your blog (at dogmaticblog.com) was getting hammered pretty badly and was driving the load of the server up near 200. Since putting the rule in, the load on your server has consistently dropped and continues to do so. Less than a minute later, and the load is already down below 20 and continuing to drop."
I do understand their situation and it totally sucks that a vast number of other blogs were serving my images direct from their blogs. Couple that with the news interest in Ledger and his untimely death - then the end result will always be server overload.
I’m not sure when the blog will be back… but hopefully sooner rather than later.
Bummer!
Sounds like it might be time to erect the .htaccess wall to prevent hotlinking.