The AP has an article up about the Lieberman website crash that is really interesting, to say the least.

U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s campaign Web site remained offline Thursday, and federal and state authorities were investigating why it crashed on the eve of this week’s defeat in a high-profile primary.

The site, Joe2006.com, appeared to have suffered from a so-called “denial of service” attack, in which computers overwhelm a site with fake traffic so real visitors can’t get through, said Richard M. Smith, an Internet security consultant in Brookline, Mass.

That of course is a common from of DOS attacks. The problem is that properly configured webservers know how to circumvent that. As matter of fact they do by throttling the requests on a site. It is also something that is very easy to detect. You go through your server logs and look at the IP addresses hitting your site.

The Lieberman campaign denied speculation among liberal Web pundits that the centrist Democrat’s Web site had simply crashed because it used a low-budget Web host unable to handle the volume.

Web hosting can cost anywhere from a few dollars a month for a personal Web site to thousands of dollars for large corporate sites.

The campaign spends about $100 to $150 a month on Web hosting services with MyHostCamp, said Dan Geary, who administers the site for the campaign. Geary said that MyHostCamp, which is owned by a friend of Geary’s, gave the site more than enough bandwidth — 200 gigabytes a month — to handle a crush of visitors.

Yes websites vary in price. Cars vary in price, houses vary in price. Lieberman was running ads on television all night on Monday night with his website listed at the bottom. Don’t you think that will generate hits>

Geary is apparently internet illiterate. Bandwidth is not the issue here as much as simultaneous connections. I have 10 times that amount of Bandwidth on my site and it goes down at busy times because too many people are accessing it at once. I have also never exceeded 500 gigs in a month.

As far as Myhostcamp, you can refer to my post from yesterday. They are not an actual “hosting company”. They are a reseller. They purchase a server from a hosting company then sub-lease off pieces of that server per month. Again the ignorance of Lieberman’s “tech” person shines through.

He said an analysis of the server suggested an attack that focused on specific components of the Web site such as internal files and e-mail.

But Smith said that even if there’s enough capacity, as important is the amount of security it has to keep intruders out.

“There are measures that can be implemented to protect against this type of attack,” Smith said. “I think they went a little cheap here. This kind of looked like a low-budget hosting service.”

Geary insists security was adequate, saying MyHostCamp’s servers are monitored by a larger company, Server Matrix, and administered by a major Web hosting company, The Planet.

Sure there are always better security measures that can be taken. This person is on a dedicated server and it is their responsibility to upgrade that server. Were they aware that an update to Apache came out last week that addressed an attack problem? I would highly doubt that. This is why if you want a truly secure internet company, you go with an actual hosting service and not a reseller. This owner of myhostcamp is most likely located in Connecticut. The server is located in Texas. That is a big problem. Note to Joe – get hosting from a company with in-house servers.

The fact is that Joe was cheap and that is what lead to his problems. His site administrator apparently does not understand the technology that much considering he is trying to equate server load to bandwidth. He also let this guy pick a hosting company that in fact wasn’t an actual hosting company, but an individual with a reseller account. I would suggest Lieberman hire an actual person who knows system administration as far as web design. I currently handle that for numerous other sites (and some of the biggest left-wing blogs out there) and we do not have these problems, even though people try. Why is that? We stay current on updates and rely heavily upon a true host that has the servers right there to fix as needed.