...more recent posts
It would appear that the server is under attack. And not from the googlebot or some other out of control crawler. This isn't http traffic. I don't know what it is. It is a single incoming spike in traffic that has happened like clockwork once an hour since yesterday. My guess, from a day of frantic googling, is that we are under a denial of service attack from a bot net. It's a pretty weak attack (incoming traffic only spikes to 2 mb/s, and it's just one spike an hour, not constant,) but evidently this sort of thing happens (presumably it's intermittent because the bot net is rotating through attacks on many different hosts.)
Of course, it still might not be anything malicious, but the traffic graphs are really weird, and my intuition is that it is malicious. This does seem strange though because we are really not hosting any controversial content.
I have mailed hurricane (my host) yesterday, but hadn't heard back yet so I just called. They had me mail the info to a different address where they said it would be looked at.
I'll let you know what I find. So far it is clearly not impacting the server (everything seems pretty snappy,) but the traffic level is very worrisome.