My guess is FR is susceptible to simple DDOS attacks that it shouldn’t be susceptible to. Why this would be I don’t know. I’m not enough of an IT techie.
Also, I don’t get why a website with a known member list can’t mitigate these attacks by simply prioritizing data requests from member IPs above unknown IPs. In that case, non-member lurkers might experience a slowdown but logged-in members wouldn’t. And if you really wanted to get serious about it, prioritize dues paying member IPs.
The whole thing just does not add up to me.
Very good suggestions, Yardstick.
And UCAN, I guess you’ve seen the comments that it was not a bandwidth issue, but was an attack. I’ve never had issues with YouTube, the Treehouse, or many other websites, but thanks for adding your thoughts into the mix.