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How Not To Run a Campaign Website

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the time-to-get-new-techs dept.

Soong writes "The blogsphere has been going crazy today about the technical difficulties being experienced by the Joe Lieberman for CT Senator web site, joe2006.com. MyDD outlines the story so far and has continuing updates. A reader at DailyKos digs deeper and finds some shamefully exposed ports. A front page story there has the money quote: 'Joe's site shares one server with 73 other sites. They pay $15/month for an overcrowded server, and then they blame others when it goes down?' kos also mentions that 'My hosting bill is now over $7K per month.' While this has immediate consequences for Joe Lieberman's campaign since his site went down Sunday night/Monday morning and the election is today, it makes me curious to see an expose on what exactly we're getting from various vendors when we buy into sub $100/month hosting plans."

14 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. "Friends of Joe Lieberman" by BSDevil · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is the name of his campaign committee - see FEC filing at http://herndon1.sdrdc.com/cgi-bin/can_detail/S8CT0 0022/

    --
    Cue The Sun...
  2. Re: Swamped by Ray+Radlein · · Score: 4, Informative

    I dunno -- it seems to that me not just holding opinions with which the overwhelming majority of your constituents disagree (not only about the war, either, of course -- for instance, his statement that Catholic hospitals should be allowed to refuse emergency treatment to rape victims was even disagreed with by something like 3/4 of the Catholics in Connecticut), but loudly and publically announcing those opinions on national television as often as humanly possible, might begin to fall under the umbrella of "cluelessness."

  3. Re:Usual Netcraft Info (and no, nobody's dead) by robdavy · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Planet is actually one of the largest providers of dedicated servers in the world and has quite a reputation for quality. They're not cheap either - no sub-$100 dedicated boxes from them...

  4. Just your standard CPanel box at theplanet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    with shared hosting. They just need to contact their cpanel admin, the person reselling the planet's services and have them take a look at (either whm or mb) their billing software and override that they have gone over bandwidth. Yes, they've paid their bill, but if you go over bandwidth, you still run into trouble.

    That's what happens when you use cheap services.

    This is all obvious because cpanel is the only crappy control panel I know with their own distro of roothat linux that runs the melange chat server on port 6666. It's not an IRC server -- the dailykos portscanners don't know their shit.

    They also ran joomla, the mambo open source effort. Well, I bet somebody saved up a zero day in joomla for this effort if it wasn't a simple "haven't paid the bills", except for the fact that joe's campaign should have had a copy of the joomla on disk that they installed so they could easily restore it. It doesn't take that long to get a website back up. Maybe somebody did take it down with an SQL injection attack. It would have been so simple to setup a quick urlrewrite to thwart most sql injections after they got the site up.

    In any case, the fact they are running cpanel is enough to convince me the admins don't know their shit.

  5. Re:$7k hosting bill? by Yusaku+Godai · · Score: 2, Informative

    100Mbps?? Yeah, like that'd hold up. DKos got almost a million hits today alone--maybe more.

  6. Not true! by bmarklein · · Score: 2, Informative
    It was not a $15/mo. account. Markos of Daily Kos was making the assumption that the Liberman campaign used the cheapest possible account, but according to http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001304.php">t his article, which includes an interview with the ISP, this wasn't the case:
    I asked Hubbell what kind of account the Lieberman campaign was paying for, and if earlier accounts were accurate that the senator's camp had taken only a minimal $15-a-month contract. "They were actually paying quite a bit more, with over 400 gigs of bandwidth a month," Hubbell said. Hubbell declined to give an exact figure, but Geary said the campaign had been paying around $150 a month for the hosting service. (Earlier, Geary told Paul Kiel the campaign paid "a bit more" than the reported $15 monthly fee.) "We have a range" of account types, myhostcamp.com's Hubbell said. "We do smaller ones, we do some larger ones."
    Not that it's relevant, but I'm glad Lamont won (I contributed to his campaign), but I think that unsubstantiated BS is always worth correcting.
  7. Worse than being a Republican by DeadPrez · · Score: 3, Informative

    Democrats saw Leiberman as too close to President George W. Bush, not necessarily the Republican party. Realize this election is all about the lack of _faith_ this country has for Mr. Bush and friends right now. If you are seen as an enabler of this administration's policies, you are vulnerable. This pro-Lamont outcome is striking fear into certain Republicans who don't sit in clearly gerrymandered districts (which is a serious cancer on democracy spreading throughout this nation so _wake up_). Don't expect a large volume of changes in either house of Congress due this incumbency stranglehold/advantage, but perhaps enough to wrestle control of the direction of the country from the President back to Congress. As the founders intended (very slowly/deliberately).

  8. Re:if my bill suddenly jumped to 7K? by Carewolf · · Score: 2, Informative

    Youtube.com stays in business because you are wrong. If you pay $7000 dollars you are not paying for bandwidth you are paying for redundancy and service, and if you really do pay that much for bandwidth, you are getting royally screwed.

  9. Re:$7k hosting bill? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It would hold up. 1 million hits in a day is around 11 users per second. Multiply by 5 since user visits aren't equally distributed during the day and you have to support 55 users/sec. A look at the size of the linked DKos page shows it is 155KB (124,000 bits). 100,000,000 / 124,0000 = approx 80 users/sec.

    What's interesting is that of the 155KB page size, 125KB of that was javascript. Ouch!

  10. Re:No - that's bullshit by spagetti_code · · Score: 3, Informative

    Given the choice between incompetence and conspiracy/enemy action,
    99% of the time its going to be incompetence.

    I vote incompetence.

  11. Re:if my bill suddenly jumped to 7K? by clickclickdrone · · Score: 2, Informative

    >Youtube.com stays in business because you are wrong
    Youtube's hosting costs are $1m a month and right now they are watching the pot of venture capital dollars trickle away and wondering how the heck they can moneterize (hate that phrase but YKWIM) the site enough to keep going with that burn rate. According to a story recently on Digg they have maybe 9 months left unless they sort something out.

    --
    I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
  12. Re:$7k hosting bill? by bytesex · · Score: 2, Informative

    155KB = 155 * 1024 = 158720 * 8 = 1269760 bits. Methinks you have left a zero out, sir !

    --
    Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
  13. Re: Swamped by fl!ptop · · Score: 2, Informative
    it's actually because >0.5 of the Democratic voters in CT think he's a Republican in all but name

    actually, just a cursory glance at his voting record for the past couple of months indicate lieberman has sided with the GOP on just 2 issues: the war in iraq and illegal immigration. everything else has been a lock-step march with the democrat party. btw, hillary clinton also voted with the GOP on the illegal immigration ammendment (S 2611), and also supported the war in iraq. would you also consider her a republican in all but name? make no mistake - lieberman is a liberal.

    --
    When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
  14. Re:CRAAAAAAAAACK GOES THAT KOOKY DEM PARTY by skinfaxi · · Score: 2, Informative
    He opposed a State bill that would have prevented hospitals from refusing to dispense the "morning after" plan B contraceptives for rape victims. "[i]n Connecticut, it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital"
    The New Haven Register, by Gregory B. Hladky on 03/13/2006

    Sided with Congress to force prolonging Terri Schiavo's life, against her and her husband's wishes.
    http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/3/27/21395 5.shtml

    Voted for Attorney General Gonzalez, who thinks the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and supports torturing detainees who are held indefinitely without trial or access to attorneys
    http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php ?vote_id=3452
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4000679.stm

    Voted to stop debate/prevent filibuster so Alito could be added to the Supreme Court
    http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_li sts/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2& vote=00001