K, I'm not a fan of joementum but it's time to put to rest some of the unfounded theories running rampant...
Techie ramblings after the flip ->
1]
Lieberman's campaign has an incompetent sysadmin. Folks, I highly doubt he
has a sysadmin, there's really no need for one. It's a political campaign and website, chances are he has someone in house who a) set up the wireless network for the office, and b) updates the website. There's no need for him to have a Unix admin. Of course, myhostcamp.com could be rightly accused of having a l8me sysadmin, but that's not the same.
2] The cheapass got what he deserved with a $15 website. There's nothing wrong with inexpensive shared hosting, per se. For example, I use and highly recommend 1and1.com for website hosting, at only $2.24 per month I get 5 Gigs of webspace and 250 Gigs of bandwith. For $7.50 I could get a Terabyte of bandwith. 1and1 hosts millions of domains. The problem with Lieberman's hosting service could be that they're just tiny. A hosting service with only 75 domains, at an average of $15 per month won't pay for much of a sysadmin after it pays a couple hundred to theplanet.com, their colo provider / ISP. (* I'm pretty sure this box is colocated, since a prebuilt server would put them on a different CIDR IP block, i.e. totalcontrolservers at 70.84.0.0/14). But cheap hosting is usually throttled, at say 3mbps, which is why it's not acceptable for high traffic sites.
3] They can change the error page, so they must have access to be able to restore the site. Every page on Lieberman's site has been redirected, as have all the hosting provider's webpages. No one FTP'd into the site and put up a new index.html page, though that doesn't rule out that they couldn't get in, it's not definitive proof that they can. I'm only speculating, but I think this was done by the hosting service.
4] The email works fine. The tests posted in this diary only prove that you can login to the mail server and it responds. The last test, an email sent from test@test.com to jnerpel@joe2006.com shows that it will accept mail for joe2006.com but there's no proof that it's delivering that mail to the pop server. And without an authorized user, we can't test whether it will accept outgoing mail from this domain.
5] They ought to be able to restore this site in a jiffy. Maybe, maybe not. Unless I'm wrong on point #1 above, the Lieberman camp doesn't have anyone in house to do database backups, leaving that responsibility up to their hosting service, and as stated already, the hosting service isn't taking in the kind of funds to pay for competent administration. My guess is there's no backup .sql file on hand. Moreover, campaigns often get stuck in a shitty turnkey situation where the website comes with a pre-installed Content Management System, like <shudder> Movable Type (I think they were using Joomla). Turnkey providers tend to not give their clients access to the backend, either to make it less idiotproof or to keep themselves holding the cards (1 click with phpmyadmin and the data is dropped. Whoops!).
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So what's my conclusion? What we DO know, is that late last night / early this morning the site was back in operation. And a reader claims to have received an email from the campaign during this time frame.
While I'm leaning toward the SQL insert theory; some hacker corrupted their database, and they don't have it backed up anywhere, these last two points seem to contradict that. So ... I think someone pulled the plug.
P.S. and since we're all talking about sites going down, anyone know what happened to bandofbrothers2006.com? There's that same "suspended.page."
P.P.S. For all of you thinking about doing a cut-rate website, it might serve you well to split your eggs into more than one basket.