chinaSMACK Celebrates Surviving DoS, Then Goes Down

In what may be best described as “asking for it”, chinaSMACK last night threw up a post celebrating their 1-year birthday:

After one year, chinaSMACK…

• Has over 300 published posts;
• Has more than 16,500 comments;
• Receives over 220,000 visits per month;
• Has over 3500 daily subscribers;
• Was a victim of a DoS attack for a week;
• Has switched hosting servers 4 times;
• Is still here.

These are pretty cool accomplishments, right?

Emphases mine.

Then, they went down for the count as 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error messages started returning for anyone trying to access www.chinasmack.com.

Half a day later and as of this writing, chinaSMACK remains inaccessible. We’ve e-mailed them to see if it’s another D0S attack but have yet to receive a response.

If this is indeed another DoS attack, there is also another possibility other than chinaSMACK “asking for it” by somewhat patting themselves on the back for a) surviving the previous attack and b) still being around. Over the past few days before chinaSMACK went down, a lot of discussion about the recent Urumqi riots were cropping up on chinaSMACK with the usual China bashing that chinaSMACK sees plenty of. As some people demanded that chinaSMACK do a post on the issue, others cautioned against it, suggesting that chinaSMACK would run the risk of quickly getting DoS attacked or harmonized if they did so.

While we don’t know what their reservations were for not covering the news item that has dominated the mainstream media and most other English-language China blogs, they certainly didn’t go there. However, the commenter community (including myself) continued to commandeer the comments of another post and discuss the issue. Following chinaSMACK going down last night, at least one regular chinaSMACK commenter has suggested on Twitter that the off-topic commenting may be to blame for the website’s current woes.