How Not To Run a Campaign Website

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."

Comments

Usual Netcraft Info (and no, nobody's dead)

[jd]

Netcraft reveals that the site is running Linux with Apache 1.3.37 - which was only recently updated from 1.3.36. (Based on that, my guess is that the "crash" was actually them upgrading the webserver.)

There's not a whole lot of other information. It was paid for by the "Friends of Joe Lieberman" (so he didn't even use his own funds for it), and the hosting company was The Planet Internet Services. Anyone buying the services of a company with a name that pretentious almost deserves problems. Oh, the ISP is located in Dallas, Texas. Not exactly a local vendor, then. And who -are- those mysterious Friends over in Texas, anyway...?