The vanshardware.com server has been the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack for about the last ten hours. Not only has our website been down, but our email server has not been functioning properly.
A DDoS is commonly carried out by a virus maker who has taken control of many infected personal computers from a remote location. The virus maker then directs his army of infected computers to attack a particular website. Because the attack may come from many thousands of computers at once, it is difficult and tedious to block the incoming malicious requests to the server without blocking legitimate traffic as well.
System administrators tending our server have been blocking the IP addresses attacking our server. Within the last hour, it appears they have been successful in reducing the severity of the issue enough that our website is becoming accessible once again.
Hopefully this issue will be completely resolved soon.