WHILE it's hard to pin-point the culprit, amid several new leaks from the EPO and an important series we have come under a lot of stress and pressure. The server, at times, was unable to cope. Bursts of dodgy traffic even crashed our cache server several times, resulting in disruption not just to Techrights but several other very large sites. It makes our site a liability to the host, which lost some large customers as a result of that. The back end is usually able to cope with many hits (millions per day), so in order to cause all this damage one must be pretty clever (or malicious). We have grown accustomed to server issues, especially at times when major releases of information were in the front page. Several companies out there offer DDOS attacks as a service.

"If I have to stay up until 7AM (same as last week), so be it."We’ve just completed a series of significant upgrades of our infrastructure (several large servers) in order to better cope with abusive traffic, like the traffic experienced since approximately one week ago. We shall now proceed to publication of another major new series, which took a lot of researching to prepare and will certainly ruffle some feathers at the EPO.

I am paying out of my own pocket for these expensive upgrades. Ideology makes it worth the money and we are not asking for donations as these would only damage the image of the site. The past week's ordeals (sleepless nights due to server issues, a lot of tinkering and dozens of hours lost to maintenance, not to mention many hours of downtime) only made us ever more eager to expose the abuses at the EPO. We won't be silenced, no matter the cost. If I have to stay up until 7AM (same as last week), so be it. ⬆