This is a cross post from a post I did at Firedoglake about Joe’s “hack”

Interesting how things develop overnight. I am of course talking about the “Joe2006 hack” story going around. I have had CNN on all day and they cover it about every 15 minutes or so. What is amazing is that a company like CNN hasn’t decided to dig into joe2006.com to see exactly what may be happening.

Markos has a post up, and his digging into this and explanation of it hits the nail right on the head:

Two posts down it’s clear that Lieberman’s website isn’t suffering from a Denial of Service attack.

But now I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman’s site went down.

They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.

Here’s the deal — you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn’t need that much bandwidth, but if you’re paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin’ cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don’t go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out.

For their part, the Lamont campaign has offered its technical expertise to get Lieberman’s site back up (which could be done in an hour by a competent sysadmin), and has added a link to the googlecached version of Lieberman’s site at the top of their blog.

For you FDL readers that have been around for a few months, you should be able to relate to what Markos is talking about. Since the move from Blogger, we are now on our third host and here is a little in depth look into that.

The first hosing company we went with was on a shared hosting account. This is the same thing that Joe has with MyHostCamp (a shared hosting account is exactly what it sounds like – numerous websites are hosted on a single server/computer). Numerous times throughout the day, we would go down. This was due to the number of hits coming in during a short amount of time. Every time a page is viewed, the server has to make thousands of calculations to process all that information and generate the page. This will have one of two possible end results; A). The processor overloads and the server shuts down or B) your account gets suspended for excessive processor usage. It is safe to say that Joe was hit by option B.

We then moved from there to another hosting company, where we had a dedicated server. This meant that the only site coming off of that server was FDL. Of course with the number of visitors this site receives, we were also overloading and at times shutting down. Again – this was from excessive processor usage.

Finally we moved to where we are now and have two separate servers hosting this site and everything is running much smoother. We still hit very busy times where the site is slow to load, but we are staying up 99% of the time now.

So what does this mean? Exactly what Markos said – you get what you paid for. Joe is using a shared hosting company that has 74 sites coming off of one computer. That has lead to his problems – not some vicious political attack. You would think CNN, MSNBC or FOX (well maybe not FOX) would have someone tech savvy enough to say “hey let’s call his hosting company”.

So what is Joe doing to prevent this? Well that is where the interesting part comes in. joe2006.com is now pointing to a new hosting company. That hosting company is GoDaddy and ironically the exact same server my own site use to be hosted on.

When I was on GoDaddy I averaged 500-1,000 hits a week. My site was constantly suspended due to excessive processor usage. So does Joe think he is so unpopular that he can’t even get 500-1,000 people to visit his site in a week? I doubt it. It looks like Joe went bargain hunting again for his hosting company. When I was hosted with GoDaddy, it cost me $3.99 a month and is still that price today.

Now what will it take to get the news media to really look into this story and talk to the people who might know the exact problem – specifically MyHostCamp?

True this could be Joe’s way of helping out Ted Stevens’ argument of the internet being nothing but a series of tubes.