Every once in a while we, like many other sites, become the target of an internet pest. Earlier today the www.dotnetnuke.com site was actually shut down briefly by a DOS attack which overloaded IIS and required a restart. Be advised, this is NOT a security issue with either DotNetNuke or IIS. It simply means that we go out of our way to provide a lot of resources and benefit to anyone who visits which leaves us open abuse on occasion.
On a positive note... the statistics might be interesting to you.
Over the course of a few hours the attacker (before they were blocked) initiated a relatively constant load of 60,000 file downloads per hour. Some of you may have noted that even our Users Online module was keeping an accurate count, recognizing as many as 22,000 simultaneous anonymous users.
The site bogged down a bit at this level because, believe it or not,... www.dotnetnuke.com is still running on a single server! I hate to admit it, but while we have moved a number of our properties into web farm infrastructure we simply have not moved the dotnetnuke.com domain yet. Off-Topic, yes... it is on our todo list.
So if you wondered why things may have seemed a little slow for while this morning, it was because some internet pest thought it would be fun to try to run dotnetnuke.com into the ground. Despite our modest infrastructure provision... it held up in a way that should give great confidence. I never cease to be amazed at how incredibly resilient this platform is.
Happy DotNetNuking!