it is hosting issues I have spoken to James and he has confirmed the host has been subject to ddos attacks.
If you dont know what a ddos attack is then basically to sum up you can send a packet of data to any computer on the internet/ ipaddress by to get a ping response from that said computer. as an example if you open up command prompt in windows or a terminal on mac and type ping
www.photoshopgurus.com it will come back with a ping speed on how long it takes for your computer to connect to the internet go through several exchanges and communicate with the server that hosts this site. it can be anything from 50 ms ping to over 1000 ms this depends on your connection and how many different exchanges the signal has to go through to reach this server from your computer so if you live in europe and this server is in america it will take longer than if you lived 2 blocks away from the server.
If you want to do a more accurate oing to see exactly how long each stage takes type tracert
www.photoshopgurus.com then press enter and that will show you a full detailed result from your computer to your router to your local exchange to a national exchange to send an international signal to america to all the exchanges your router has to send the data to the receiving server. it will break down this in ms.
usually if a site is none responsive this will tell you exactly where the problem is with a time out request. if it gets all the way to the photoshopgurus and times out then it is local problems but as of lately it is the stage before hand which is the actual hosting company that times out.
anyway point is hackers have a way of sending these pings to a server or a hosting company (which is usually the case most of the time) that takes that tiny packet of data and multiplies it so it is several mbs in size and even gigabytes now. They can either do this from 1 computer or use a network of computers which can all be on same network or any computer around the world if the hacker has a method of accessing that computer to send a packet data out this can be created using spyware so sometimes even you can be helping a ddos attack without even knowing.
Now how does this take a site offline.
Well if you go to speedtest.net and run a speedtest you will see your download speed and upload speed. this server has very similar system all though they tend to have 1 gigabyte connections. which depending on your hosting type will either allow you to have a 1 gigabyte connection or part of it cheaper hosting tends to be 100 mb connections. meaning at any 1 time the server your site is hosted on can handle 100 mbs of incoming data and 100 mbs of outgoing data at a time. for usual browsing the actual data used is minimal hence we can have thousands of people connected to this site with possibility a bit slower than normal browsing times. This is why many internet providers do a throttle of your internet speed at peak times so the networks dont get overloaded.
so say this server can handle 100 mbps of data and genuine usage of innocent people using this site is using 50 mbps of that data and a hacker or group of hackers send an attack which results in this server (or the hosting server) getting 450 gbps then that means the data being sent to the router is infact 450,000 mbps on a network that can only take 100 mbps so the router gets overloaded and can no longer handle any more data and confuse itself sorting out what is real genuine data and what is fake data by ddosers. There is software to prevent this that has a better grip on sorting out fake data and only allowing genuine data to go through to the actual server. But overload the router with to much data and it will just go nope not accepting to any more traffic until I have processed all pending requests.
Thats why people all arrange to browse smaller sites at the same time becaus ethey cant handle thousands of people browsing the site without overloading the router and then it taking the website offline. Hackers go 1 step further and multiply their data to take down bigger sites and even hosting companies.
Unfortunately bigger companies that are the targeted sites tend to be hosts which smaller sites and innocents sites run of same network and they become innocent victims.
ddos attack = distributed denial of service attack meaning distribute data across a network so it denys the service of the network.
so there you go incase you were interested.
