No, really. It's totally true. It's a long story, but let's begin with the beginning. A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about Lady Gaga's rise to fame, and in the entry I cited Christina Aguilera's use of Gaga's style at an awards show as evidence of Gaga's influence. That entry BLEW UP, getting thousands of hits a day over the past month. It was nuts!

I thought it was all blogging history when I left last Sunday for Puerto Rico to meet my family for a cruise around the Caribbean. Fun in the sun! Alas, I was wrong. I checked my e-mail Tuesday to find that several readers had e-mailed me saying my blog was down, and that they were recieving some kind of error message when they tried to accesss www.trevorhoppe.com. I immediately sent a note to my host, but I had limited e-mail access and I was out of the country, so the timing was terrible. I couldn't do anything while I was down South, so I enjoyed the cruise and decided to deal with things when I got back home.

I flew back Sunday to find an e-mail from my host saying that they had taken the site off-line because it was grossly draining my shared server's resources. I figured it was because of a spike in traffic, and quickly searched for a new host that could handle more bandwith. I signed up for Media Temple's GRID service, which is basically a fancier version (WARNING: Geek talk ahead) of a shared server that can handle spikes in traffic because it's built on a network of powerful servers, rather than on a single system. Sexy! I signed up, and began the transfer.

I ran into a wall when I was trying to restore my blog's Movable Type MySQL database (which houses everything -- comments, entries, templates, etc) from my old server. This led me to - out of curiousity - filter throug the SQL file, where I began reading my Error Log that Movable Type records. I recognized something strange immediately: Before the crash, hundreds of search queries came through in minutes for "Christina Aguilera". I realized that I had been the victim of a DOS (denial of service) attack in the form of search queries.

So it appears some zealous Christina Aguilera fan crashed my site. But they were quite smart about it -- the 100s of requests all came from different IP addresses. It's possible that this is a coincidence, but that's highly unlikely.

In any case, I've moved to a new host that should be better equipped to deal with this kind of influx of traffic. But websites are always vulnerable to this kind of attack. Hopefully, Christina fans will be relieved to hear that I am a HUGE fan of her's and never meant to disparage her name. It's just outrageously funny. I'm quite flattered that they felt my site was worthy of their efforts.

In the end, it's appropriately the gayest attack possible. God bless web geeks. But let's get back to what matters! My sincerest apologies for being offline for such a ridiculous length of time. Had it all happeneded when I was in town, things would have been different. Alas, it was an unfortunate timing of events.

xoxo

Trevor